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Economics and the Slow Unraveling of the Modern West
December 6th, 2025
Energy economics sits at the center of every meaningful discussion about the fate of modern civilization. You can ignore politics, central banks, and even currency systems for a while, but you cannot ignore the physics of energy. And in a world that has increasingly built its prosperity on fragile abstractions (debt, narratives, and financial engineering) the hard reality of energy is beginning to reassert itself.
Doomberg’s recent conversation offers a sobering reminder: our economic system is not just strained; it is fundamentally misaligned with the physical foundations required for durability.
Since 1971, when Nixon severed the dollar’s convertibility into gold, the West has drifted into a world of monetary illusion. But unlike fiat money, energy cannot be printed. As the cracks spread through the global order, true nature of energy economics will become ever more apparent.
The
Foundation: What Energy Economics Actually Is
Energy economics is the study of how societies produce, convert, distribute, and consume energy; and how these physical processes shape economic prosperity. Every factory surge, every data center expansion, every military deployment, every household comfort – none of it exists without a dense, reliable, and affordable flow of energy.
Historically, the arc of human advancement has been nothing more than the story of rising energy capture. Pre-industrial societies lived on the metabolic limits of human and animal labor. The shift to coal in the 18th century didn’t just usher in the Industrial Revolution, it multiplied humanity’s effective power output by orders of magnitude.
Oil economics then accelerated the transformation again in the 20th century, enabling global trade networks, industrial agriculture, mass transportation, and digital infrastructure. Hydrocarbons became the invisible scaffolding for everything modern people take for granted.
The post–World War II boom was, quite literally, a fossil-fuel boom. The United States built highways, suburbs, manufacturing hubs, and a dominant military machine on the back of abundant hydrocarbons. Meanwhile, the Bretton Woods system kept currencies anchored, helping convert cheap energy into rising standards of living.
But once the dollar severed its final link to gold in 1971, the West began financing its energy consumption not with productivity but with credit. Energy economics turned into a quiet warning that most economists ignored. While oil, gas, and coal still delivered prosperity, the financial system built atop them drifted into fantasy.
Today, debates about nuclear energy economics, renewable energy economics, and resource energy economics stem from a simple truth: every society’s fate is determined not by ideology, but by the quantity and quality of energy it can command. Doomberg’s analysis repeatedly underscores this point – the countries that retain cheap, dense energy win. Those that outsource or abandon it collapse.
Geopolitics
Through the Lens of Energy
To understand modern geopolitics, you must strip away the headlines and view nations as organisms competing for energy flows. Energy economics explains why alliances form, why wars erupt, and why propaganda saturates every narrative. Countries do not posture endlessly over ideology, they maneuver for hydrocarbons, pipelines, shipping lanes, and the resource assets that determine whether their economies thrive or wither.
For decades, the Western world assumed that political influence alone could shape global outcomes. But as Doomberg emphasizes, the real driving force is energetic leverage. Russia’s position in the global system is not due to its GDP, which is smaller than that of several U.S. states, but because it remains one of the world’s primary suppliers of natural gas, crude oil, coal, and strategic minerals. Europe’s chronic dependence on Russian hydrocarbons turned the Ukraine conflict into a slow-motion revelation of the West’s energy fragility.
The media has framed the war as a purely moral struggle, but from an energy economics standpoint it is a contest over control of pipelines, buffer zones, export routes, and the broader reconfiguration of Eurasian energy corridors. When the U.S. provides Ukraine with real-time military intelligence, it isn’t merely supporting an ally, it is trying to shape the future flow of hydrocarbons and geopolitical influence across the region.
Doomberg hints that the most meaningful negotiations may not involve Ukraine at all. If the U.S. and Russia choose to pursue a bilateral arrangement (centering on Arctic development rights, Alaskan resource partnerships, or cooperative extraction of oil, gas, and rare earth minerals) Europe’s formal objections would be irrelevant. Energy superpowers do not need permission from energy dependents. A multipolar world is forming precisely because nations are realigning around resource energy economics, not ideology.
This is why the possibility of a US-Russia strategic energy pact carries enormous implications. Opening Arctic reserves, coordinating Arctic shipping, or sharing development zones would redraw the map of global oil economics. It could shift the center of gravity in nuclear energy economics, mineral extraction, LNG flows, and even future renewable energy economics, since these rely heavily on rare earth supply chains currently dominated by China.
Western sanctions, often presented as decisive tools of pressure, lose their potency when the target nation controls indispensable energy resources. Russia can withstand far more economic punishment than the media narrative suggests because it sits atop vast hydrocarbon reserves and maintains tight energy partnerships with China, India, and the Global South. In energy terms, Russia is a creditor nation while Europe is a debtor – a fact rarely admitted publicly.
The larger point is that geopolitics continues to orbit energy. The Ukraine war, European instability, Arctic resource competition, and the slow realignment of global alliances all stem from the simple reality that the 21st century will be defined not by who prints the most money, but by who controls the densest, most reliable energy sources. The nations that grasp this are rising. Those that ignore it are drifting into crisis.
Britain as Case Study: When Energy Foundations Fail
Doomberg’s discussion of Britain cuts right to the bone. In his view, Britain is becoming a failed state, not because of a single political leader, but because it allowed its energy foundation to erode. A nation that once powered the world with coal now produces almost none of its own energy. It hemorrhages heavy industry, depends on imported hydrocarbons, and survives by financializing what remains of its economy.
An economy without energy is like a body without food. It can survive for a while by cannibalizing fat, then muscle, then organs. Eventually, the system fails. Britain is already showing advanced symptoms: political instability, debt stress, social unrest, and an elite completely detached from physical reality.
The tragedy isn’t merely political. It is energetic. And it serves as a stark preview of what happens when an advanced nation forgets the fundamentals.
The
Technological Superpower Nobody Talks About
While much of the modern conversation focuses on renewables or ESG mandates, Doomberg reminds us that oil and gas companies remain technological superpowers; deflationary machines that continually drive down the real cost of energy supply.
The long-term trend is unmistakable: in real terms, oil keeps getting cheaper. When measured in ounces of gold (a currency that governments cannot debase) the cost of a barrel of oil has been grinding toward zero for decades. This isn’t magic; it’s engineering. Ultra‑deepwater drilling, shale breakthroughs, and global exploration advances are expanding the accessible supply of hydrocarbons far faster than depletion can erode it.
This is the inconvenient truth for energy transition narratives: hydrocarbons are not running out. They are becoming easier to produce. Oil economics is not in terminal decline, it is evolving.
The Coming
Reckoning for the West
As Doomberg often notes, civilizations do not collapse because they run out of ideas. They collapse because they run out of cheap energy. The U.S. still enjoys a major buffer i.e., its vast hydrocarbon reserves and willingness to extract them. This grants Americans a resilience that Britain no longer possesses. But energy abundance cannot paper over unlimited debt, bloated bureaucracies, or a financial system built on ever-expanding leverage.
The West’s post‑1971 experiment in monetary alchemy is now colliding with the hard floor of physical reality. Renewable energy economics cannot yet replace hydrocarbons at scale. Nuclear energy economics remains politically constrained. And hydrocarbons, though abundant, cannot indefinitely subsidize a financial system detached from productivity.
Every empire eventually faces the bill for its illusions. Ours is coming due.
Conclusion:
Energy Is Destiny, and Destiny Is Closing In
Energy economics reveals an uncomfortable truth that the modern West has spent decades trying to forget: prosperity is not a policy choice, a monetary trick, or a diplomatic posture. It is the byproduct of commanding dense, reliable, and affordable energy. Doomberg’s analysis makes clear that every major trend shaping the 21st century (from the fragmentation of global alliances to the decay of once-powerful nations) flows from this single foundation.
The nations that understand this reality are repositioning themselves accordingly. Russia, China, and much of the Global South are aligning around resource security, long-term hydrocarbons access, nuclear capacity, and control of mineral supply chains. They are building strategies grounded in physics.
Meanwhile, the Western world drifts further into abstractions, convinced that debt can replace discipline and that political narratives can substitute for energy independence.
The slow unraveling now underway is not the product of bad luck or temporary mismanagement. It is the direct consequence of abandoning the energetic basis of industrial civilization. From Britain’s hollowed-out infrastructure to Europe’s dangerous dependence on foreign hydrocarbons, the symptoms are converging. And while the United States retains the buffer of abundant domestic energy, even that advantage cannot indefinitely compensate for a financial system increasingly divorced from physical reality.
Energy economics reminds us that civilizations endure when they align their ambitions with the resources that sustain them. They falter when they mistake money-illusion for wealth. The West’s long experiment in monetary detachment and geopolitical wish-casting is clashing with the unforgiving arithmetic of energy.
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About the Author
Steve Bain is an economics writer and analyst with a BSc in Economics and experience in regional economic development for UK local government agencies. He explains economic theory and policy through clear, accessible writing informed by both academic training and real-world work.
Read Steve’s full bio
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