11 October 2021. Bond | Energy
Learning how to be a consumer, the James Bond way; the energy challenge of the next deacde.
Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. (For the next few weeks this might be four days a week while I do a course: we’ll see how it goes). Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story.
#1: Learning how to be a consumer, the James Bond way
The buzz about the new Bond film was a chance to think about some of the history of the Bond franchise, and its social context. I was helped in this by an edition of Mark Kermode’s Secrets of Cinema on the spy genre. It seemed the programme had been made to coincide with the release of No Time to Die. (Currently on the BBC iPlayer, for readers who have access).
Kermode’s tele-essays on film are among the most intelligent coverage of film on television, and his script partner Kim Newman may have something to do with this.
One of the observations he makes early in the programme is that the spy genre was by far the biggest genre in the 1960s, which makes sense. The Cold War was at its height, and the Cuban missile crisis and the building of the Berlin Wall were fresh in the memory.
Bond, of course, isn’t much of a spy. He travels under his own name and insists on introducing himself with it twice. There’s no cover story.
But it the 1960s, his exotic travel and expensive tastes were part of his appeal to audiences that were just starting to learn about international travel and consumer pleasures. Fleming’s novels anticipate this: he peppered them with brand references to make the upper crust world of his spy more believable.
(James Bond (Daniel Craig) and Paloma (Ana de Armas) in "No Time To Die," an EON Productions and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios film. (Credit: Nicola Dove © 2020 DANJAQ, LLC and MGM. All rights reserved.)
And even a film like The Ipcress File, in which Michael Caine plays a kind of anti-Bond, as Kermode observes, is still swimming in the sea of this new consumerism. It opens with Caine grinding coffee beans for his breakfast, rather than spooning out some instant coffee, and a critical scene is played out in one of the then-new supermarkets, to the distaste of Caine’s spy boss.
It’s easy to forget, from the distance of the 2020s, that people had to learn how to be consumers. In the 1960s, my father in law, who was a commercial pilot, appeared in a short British United film explaining how easy it is to travel from London to Genoa. (Eccentrically, this was used in a Cornershop song).
The circuits of capital are never far away, in other words.
In this sense, those early Bond films have something to do with ‘50s films like To Catch A Thief and Three Coins in the Fountain, where the real star is the location. (The Riviera and Rome, respectively).
No spoilers, but there’s still some of this in No Time to Die. The early sequence of the retired Bond, winding through the Italian mountains in the Aston Martin on the way to the luxury hotel, could come straight out of a car ad. The scenes in Jamaica—a nod to Fleming, perhaps—have the vibe of a Bacardi ad.
Any maybe I’m overthinking this, but if there is a trajectory in a Bond film, the action tends to start close to capital and end up a long way away from shopping opportunities—in the remote Highlands in Skyfall, for example.
One of the the films referenced by Kermode is Red Sparrow, from 2018, in which a Russian ballerina—played by Jennifer Lawrence—is pressured into becoming a Russian spy. She’s on the trail of a ‘mole’ sent to make contact with the CIA. In one of the clips she has nothing but contempt for the West. It had
grown weak on shopping and social media.
#2: The energy challenge of the next decade
In many ways we are still living in the world created by the succession of oil shocks in the 1970s. At the very least, economic policy obsession with inflation is a legacy of the inflation that followed that decade.
In a piece in the redesigned New Statesman, the political scientist Helen Thompson argues that the energy crises of the coming decade will be more disruptive even than the 1970s.
This is her summary of how the 1970s went:
In an age of high energy costs and constricted supply, inflation and unemployment rose together. Forced to choose, governments and central banks decided to prioritise controlling inflation. Western governments made it harder for trade unions to strike, curtailing the ability of workers to demand higher wages. The US Federal Reserve then administered a severe monetary shock to the world economy. In driving interest rates up to exceptionally high levels, Paul Volcker, the chair of the Federal Reserve, accelerated the de-industrialisation of most Western economies.
There’s a bit more to the story than this, but you get the general idea.
Now, as she observes, we’re seeing some parallels to that turbulence:
The parallels appear obvious. Western economies are experiencing simultaneously rising energy prices and upward pressure on wages. Higher prices and scarce supply in one energy sector are impacting others, with the shortage of gas in Europe and Asia driving up coal prices.
But the differences may be as important as the similarities.
The first difference is that although there are supply side issues here—the Saudi oilfields are ageing, Russia is using its gas to geopolitical ends—more of the impact is coming from the demand side:
(T)hese constraints are happening at a time when energy markets are still absorbing what is already a 20-year Asian demand shock. Per capita energy consumption in China was more than 700 per cent higher in 2019 than in 1973. However unseemly the scramble for oil between the Western countries in 1973, there was no equivalent to the most recent situation of the Chinese government demanding that energy companies procure supply of all energy sources at any cost.
And the second significant difference is that one of the responses to the ‘70s shock was diversify oil and gas production. The US increased its internal investment. And, fortunately, at least from a geopolitical perspective, the next significant discoveries came from the North Sea. High oil prices made the production of this more expensive oil economically viable.
Now, of course, the same governments have made public commitments to getting to Net Zero by 2050, and any attempt to increase fossil fuel production runs directly counter to this policy objective:
Today, since the energy policies of Western governments discourage investment in oil and gas, reduced supply of these two energy sources is a desired end. The problem is that demand cannot fall fast enough to avoid a supply crisis... Now governments cannot encourage new production anywhere without compromising their net zero commitments. Instead, they will have to preside over reduced energy consumption and discover that politics is becoming a contest over who can access energy and at what price.
Well, her article stops there, which is a shame, because there are a few things that would have been worth adding.
The first is that there’s definitely scope both to reduce energy demand and to move it away from fossil fuels. At the moment, oil and gas account for more than 80% of world energy demand, but a lot of that gets poured into combustion engined vehicles and similar.
At the same time, energy intensity continues to decline as economies continue to be come more efficient at using the stuff. There’s still quite a lot of scope to reduce this further, and there’s also scope to reduce energy demand through policy measures.
Third, the fall in production costs for renewables continues to be dramatic, notable for solar. In general, renewables are now at or below ‘grid parity’ in most energy markets. Renewables, of course, are usually locally produced.
Taken together, these three represent the nexus of a coherent national strategy for a government that wants to develop it, based on skills and infrastructure investment.
And it’s also worth mentioning that investors are trying, generally, to reduce the carbon intensity of their portfolios—meaning they are more reluctant than they used to be to invest in fossil fuels.
This all means, taken together, that it is possible to have a completely different view of how much energy you need to access, and where it needs to be accessed from. It’s not just about geopolitics any more; it’s about industrial strategy.
Notes from readers: Charles Arthur replied to my piece on tech companies and interoperability by reminding me that a decade or so ago there was “a company called FriendFeed which aggregated all the feeds from your social networks: so you could see your Twitter timeline, Facebook News Feed, Flickr groups, etc in a single place that wasn’t any of those. It posed quite a threat to the companies, even though it had few users and they tended to find it overwhelming. So Facebook bought it and shut it very firmly down.” More on this in his book Social Warming.
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