The latest Orlov commentary on this is available only to subscribers. But I can precis its content here without breaching that trust. It’s highly persuasive, for my money.
It starts from the viewpoint of an evil neo-liberal oligarchic globalist genius who is wrestling with a serious and imminent danger. The danger flows from these facts (note: facts! Already well-established and not really arguable):
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The global economy of today is utterly, utterly dependent on a ready supply of fossil hydrocarbons - oil, gas, coal - to power it. Keeping this power supply running is critical to keep the economy from collapsing. Constant growth of both economic activity and its crucial energy supply has to continue forever, or else the capitalist economic system moves rapidly to collapse mode. There is NO stable balance point between for capitalism. Endless growth is mandatory. But new discoveries of fossil-hydrocarbons has pretty well petered out now, and current sources are dwindling remorselessly, and getting harder to suck completely dry, with constantly-falling EROEI. The ‘low-hanging fruit’ is long gone. As has been foreshadowed for some time now, this absolutely critical energy problem has been intensifying for several decades, and is now, at last, coming to the boil. Temporary, largely illusory work-arounds such as fracking are coming to their ponzi-crash denouments right now. The crunch is here.
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There is NO - repeat NO! - viable alternative to fossil-hydrocarbons at current energy-demand levels anywhere on the horizon; not developed and ready; not even remotely viable sometime in the future. Nada. ‘Renewable’ systems cannot be made, maintained and run without constant essential energy-subsidies from fossil-hydrocarbons.
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Therefore, reasons the evil genius, to save and keep running at least survival-areas of the global economy (like, for example, the Russia-China-plus-satellites bloc) and keep them running, drastic cutbacks in overall world energy demand now have to be enforced - promptly, actively and - above all - effectively, with crash-priority. (The sort of thing that poor green innocents like Greta and friends can only dream about, ineffectually; don’t worry kids, it’s being done for you, pronto, by the nasty hard-faced deeply un-green grown-ups…
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An artificially-hyped global panic about a - largely mythical - threat from a ‘new, terrible virus illness’ turns out to be a wonderful destroyer of - wholly unnecessary - energy-demanding enterprises. It’s proving to be a stunningly-effective way of stampeding billions of plebs into pleading with ‘our leaders’ to take draconian charge of the situation, and to enforce all the measures they deem necessary - any high-handed action affirmed to be ‘essential to keep us all safe’; no limits needed - and all done with our, the plebs, raucous, willingly-submissive approval! (FFS!)
Dmitry points out that the covysteria has pretty well destroyed much of the global tourist trade, probably permanently, and has - concomitantly - inflicted a drastic shrinkage on international travel, especially by energy-guzzling aircraft. It’s also wiping away, pretty certainly forever, a whole swathe of essentially-pointless economic activities amongst the Pampered Twenty Percent of the world’s peoples: businesses such as dog-groomers, nail-technicians, yoga studios, and so on, through a long, long list of optional-extra economic activities. All their multiple energy demands are thus closed down. Permanently, we can gamble.
A massive switch away from commuting by individual cars between homes in the ex-urbs and offices in the centre, to working from home has also been enforced, pretty well overnight, with huge falls in energy demand for petrol; which as Dmitry points out, is essentially a waste by-product of the refining work that produces the much more economically-crucial diesel, ship-bunkering and aviation fuel. A knock-on effect of this home-working is a big fall in need for costly city-centre office space - with all its excessive energy demands.
All of these emergency steps are now made mandatory by the ominous and very evident fact that the ludicrous US economic policy of ramping up huge, obviously-never-to-be-repaid ‘loans’ is now nearing its collapse point. The world’s suckers just aren’t rushing to buy US debt any more. Those repo-collateral crises last year between ‘TBTF’ (hah!) banks and the US Federal Reserve were an unmistakable signal.
And so on. There’s a lot more detail, all in Dmitry’s wonderfully-entertaining, acerbic prose. I recommend highly that interested readers subscribe to Dmitry’s SubscribeStar account (or censorship-minded Patreon, if you’re still naive enough to trust them). He publishes roughly two essays a month, plus a trickle of - unpaywalled - interviews with various alt-podcasts. You can get these pricelessly-insightful essays for as little as the price of a mug of tea - per month.