Sky-High Oil Prices. A Fertilizer Shortage. Now Add a “Super El Niño.” | The knock-on effects from the Iran war are intersecting with other crises and destabilizing the world. The worst may be yet to come.
https://newrepublic.com/article/208547/iran-war-polycrisis-oil-gas-fertilizer-prices-super-el-nino
Posted by thenewrepublic
7 Comments
Yes.
Yes it is.
Brace for impact.
The West is getting a master’s class about the downsides to our dominant philosophical approach to things: Reductionism, where we look at indivudual parts of something. But the climate and the economy and our food …. that’s only understood using a more eastern holistic or “systems” approach.
This is a great (scary) systems peek at what 2026 may be like. And I learned a new word **polycrisis analysis**
*In the longer term, the world’s multilateral system needs standing capacity to monitor how crises in different domains interact, so that we stop being repeatedly blindsided by cascading crises that careful analysis could have anticipated. This is what* [*polycrisis analysis*](https://cascadeinstitute.org/technical-paper/introduction-to-polycrisis-analysis-guide/) *seeks to address. The goal is not to replace specialists but to develop the tools and foster the conversations that track risk interactions across silos before containable shocks compound into systemic breakdowns.*
The worst part is that we should have been preparing for this.
We should have not gone to war (obviously) and should have increased taxes on the wealthy, we should have produced more green energy, we should have wound down the war machine a bit, we should have pulled back some, so that we had some political/economic/financial ammo in the tank for when things get back.
But we took relatively good times and turned them bad quickly, and in that same time, spent ALL of our ‘ammo’ that we could theoretically use to help soften the blow of hard times.
There are few financial or political or economic levers to pull anymore, and Trump/MAGA are actively trying to make things worse, rather than better.
Covid lockdowns were just a dress rehearsal.
Imagine if we had taking the climate seriously when An Inconvenient Truth was released.
Yeah we’re not cooked yet but we will be cooking all summer. Pray for a good winter!
This is what Trump meant by destroying a civilization.