When doing my undergraduate degree in historical studies I had a professor who would often write a single word on sections of my essays in red pen: "CONTEXT." I didn't appreciate the significance at the time, but I do now. Moments in history like the one we live in now cannot be understood without context.
In these newsletter introductions I have tried to include precisely that: context to events that otherwise allows those events to be framed in misleading ways (such as the narratives we are seeing around the Venezuela oil deal).
From time to time in these introductions, I'll start bringing in some insights from the realm of environmental history (let me know if these are worthwhile or not). For the sake of brevity I have included a first attempt at this here in full as a link. It's on the incredible power of narratives with beginnings, middles, and ends over leaders' decision making. But here's a short excerpt:
"Getting Canada to drill baby drill is a U.S. goal in and of itself and climate action an obstacle to U.S. energy dominance (again all the more reason to take climate action). In the 'Trumpian' world view we might well describe the desired future energy narrative to be as follows:
Canada contained large oil and gas reserves U.S. policy came to influence Canadian policy (both through appeasement, and through unstrategic attempts at resistance via oil and gas itself, Canadians were wrongly convinced that burning more oil and gas was necessary).
These reserves of oil and gas were extracted and burned for AI data centres because - for whatever justification suited the moment - it was felt they must be.
Resistance was quieted by the insistence that economics alone would lead to a renewable future, while simultaneously public money was used to keep oil and gas competitive with renewables for as long as possible.
....But I would prefer to see a different narrative play out - one that accounts for what happens after fossil fuels are burned (or not burned) and for a pragmatic assessment of our immediate situation:
Canada contained vast reserves of oil and gas, but many people in Canada recognized these could not be burned in order to have a climate-safe future, that they had no market aside from an artificial one, and that real resistance to the U.S. meant going renewable.
The U.S. pressured Canada, and played every trick in the book to push for oil and gas expansion, and some leaders listened.
But, ultimately, people resisting such oil and gas expansion - along with the declining price and economic benefits of renewables - stopped expansion from happening.
We still have the power to decide which narrative we want historians to write about our time..." Read more here. | 
