The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 84, February 2026 Page 14 From the series The world energy battle The UN Climate Conference COP30 fails to put an end to fossil fuels and sheds light on a cracked international order [ Euronews , November 24th]. A snapshot of the global energy economy A detailed analysis of the global energy situation, as shown in the tables, explains why fossil fuels are still necessary for global economic development. The sources for our analysis are World Bank data and the latest reports from the International Energy Agency (IEA): the "World Energy Outlook 2025" and "Electricity 2025" . For the comparison between gross domestic products (GDPs) from 2010-2024, we took as a reference the statistics, in constant 2015 dollars and at current exchange rates, published by the World Bank. We made this choice in order to have consistent data for the period. There are often large discrepancies between different statistics...

Internationalism No. 33, November 2021 Page 6 Can a good recovery do damage? The answer is: yes, sometimes it can, if it triggers major imbalances. The capitalist mode of production is a source of imbalances, inequalities and asymmetries. This time, the imbalance is largely due to the states which have concocted an unexpectedly strong recovery, pulled along by private consumption, with their stimuli, subsidies, relief, tax cuts and zero-rate credits. According to The Economist , the stimuli handed out by governments during the pandemic amounted to about $10,400 billion in the world, equal to one eighth of the 2020 gross world product in current dollars. According to the April IMF Fiscal Monitor , governments, additional expenditure and lost revenue in the advanced economies were equal to 16% of the sum of their GDPs, in the face of losses which, in the final balance sheets, amounted to 4.5% of it. A good part of this went on governmen...

From the series The world car battle If at the beginning of the 21 st century electrification had technological limits in batteries, both in terms of cost and range, these are now partly overcome, because electric cars have a range of 240-450 km, more than enough for 95% of journeys of less than 50 km. The major obstacle remains the construction of a network of charging stations and their integration with the electricity grid. The race between China, Europe, and USA UBS Evidence Lab, a team of UBS bank experts working in 55 specialised labs to provide data on investment decisions, predicts that cost parity between electric and internal combustion cars will be achieved in 2024 [ Inside EVs , October 20th 2020]. By then, the development of car electrification will be self-sustaining without government subsidies. Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), in its report Electric Vehicle Outlook 2020 , estimates that by 2022 carmakers will have 500 different models of electric cars avai...