I look forward to continue working with @stevenvdwalle.bsky.social in Leuven!

I enjoyed the honor of serving as paranymph. Nice chance to dress up as a penguin

The one conclusion that stood out for me: in the 80s, "oil companies increasingly preferred the short-term higher profitability of oil investments over the long-term return on investments in highly uncertain nuclear projects" (p.142).

--> uncertainty as one of the factors fostering short-termism.

He studied how oil companies were deeply involved in atomic energy for decades, and why they largely divested away from it in the 1980s. A highly topical dissertation for today's energy transition.

With writing from Andrea Kendall-Taylor, @michaelkofman.bsky.social, Philip Zelikow and @sam-workman.bsky.social

Working hypothesis for IR scholars/economists: with more, and more powerful, autocrats in the world, democracies will be forced to spend more on defense, energy & food security etc. If policymakers recognize the uncertainty, that is.

Please do share any research you know in this direction!

So what about the consequences?

Facing an unpredictable future, governments need to build resilience and redundancies, just to be sure. So administrations will need to work less efficiently

medium.com/3streams/to-...

Bu I wonder whether even Zelikow's cautious assessment underestimates the deep geopolitical uncertainty of this time

Philip Zelikow wrote: "We are in an exceptionally volatile, dynamic, and unstable period of world history. During the next two or three years, the situation will probably settle more durably in one direction or another: wider war or uneasy peace"

tnsr.org/2024/05/conf...

This means that dictators like Putin make the world much more unpredictable than Western policymakers and electorates would like (and sometimes realize). The geopolitical future is deeply uncertain.

Key quote: Dictators "tend to produce the most risky and aggressive foreign policies. Countries with personalist authoritarians at the helm are the most likely to initiate interstate conflicts, the most likely to fight wars against democracies, and the most likely to invest in nuclear weapons."