Glenn Diesen - Greater Eurasia Podcast Warwick Powell: Age of Energy Sovereignty & Energy Wars
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Mar 31, 2026 
Warwick Powell, adjunct professor and author focused on thermoeconomics and energy sovereignty, joins to explore energy as the foundation of economies. He discusses societies as energy systems, the shift from material to financial economics, declining energy returns, and how electrification, renewables, and strategic resource moves could reshape future conflicts.
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Societies Are Energy Transformation Systems
- Human societies are best understood as energy transformation systems that must produce surplus energy to sustain order against entropy.
- Warwick Powell ties thermodynamics to social reproduction, arguing information and finance circuits serve material energy circuits but also consume energy.
Three Circuits That Sustain Economies
- Modern economies have three interlinked circuits: material production, finance as claims on future value, and information that binds them and consumes energy.
- Finance can outgrow material capacity causing bubbles; information can be entropic if its energetic cost exceeds its benefit.
Price Theory Hid Energetic Realities
- The 20th-century shift to neoclassical economics collapsed use value and exchange value into price, obscuring material and energetic foundations.
- Powell argues this ideology aided financialization and mispricing of real energetic constraints like oil futures.
