The crown joules: Resource peaks and monetary hegemony

Global energy and monetary systems appear to be deeply linked. Whereas mainstream economics focuses on the exchange aspects of the energy trade over the more structural aspects, the biophysical view of ecological economics and the historical economic thought exemplified by William Jevons help explain why monetary hegemony has correlated with large energy surpluses in the past. When such surpluses begin to decline, dramatic changes in monetary and financial systems often ensue—as was the case in the twentieth‐century United Kingdom and United States and, I argue, as is the case in twenty‐first‐century China. Considering energy and finance as linked systems allows us to more clearly understand the contemporary global economic and climate impasse—and to include China's monetary role in the new century as part of a larger solution.