Economy featured

What I Learned This Week: Gold Holdings, Political Divides, and the DOE Climate Report

By Nate Hagens, originally published by The Great Simplification

September 15, 2025

Frankly 107

Recorded on: Sep 9, 2025

Description

In this week’s Frankly, in a continuation of his ‘What I Learned This Week’ series, Nate updates viewers on things he learned in the past week, and the implications for our sociocultural trajectory. This edition focuses on recent financial and political headlines – global gold holdings, shifting geopolitical energy deals, and new U.S. Department of Energy reports – and explains their relevance to our biophysical reality and broader geopolitical landscape. Through this exercise, Nate invites podcast viewers to use a systems lens to integrate the wide array of news we are bombarded with into the large evolving story of The Human Predicament.

Why does it matter that central banks now hold more gold than the U.S. treasuries? How might expanding energy collaborations between Russia and China shift the global political power of the United States and Europe?  How do current economic and political incentives affect the nature of energy science, and what we consider to be ‘truth’ itself?

Show Notes & Links to Learn More

01:13 – Foreign Central Banks Hold More Gold Than Treasuries

01:38 – Value of gold

02:22 – TGS Bend Not Break series

02:50 – fertilizer production by country

03:32 – France bond yields, Germany bond yields, Japan bond yields

04:23 – France’s government collapses with Prime Minister François Bayrou ousted in a confidence vote

04:52 – Gallup poll: Americans’ Satisfaction With U.S., by Party ID

06:00 – Shanghai Cooperation Organization

06:15 – New “Power of Siberia 2” energy collaboration between China and Russia

07:55 – 2025 Dept of Energy report on climate change

08:06 – Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, Trump team disbands controversial US climate panel

09:25 – Steven Koonin: At Long Last, Clarity on Climate

09:42 – ‘CO2 is plant food’ argument

10:17 – What do plants need to thrive?

10:32 –  Liebig’s Law of the Minimum

10:52 – Kristie Ebi, et al.: “Nutritional quality of crops in a high CO2 world” 

11:15 – Plants responding to drought and heat stress, Increased flooding, Shifting seasons

11:30 – Osler Ortez, et al.: “Corn Response to Long-Term Weather Stressors”

12:22 – Land/soil degradation, Water scarcity, Pollinator decline

14:06 – Endocrine disrupting chemicals, U.S. layoffs

15:08 – Ukrainian woman killed on train in North Carolina

Download transcript

Teaser image credit: Author supplied.
Nate Hagens

Nate Hagens

Nate Hagens is the Executive Director of The Institute for the Study of Energy & Our Future (ISEOF). Allied with leading ecologists, energy experts, politicians, and systems thinkers, ISEOF assembles roadmaps for understanding how human societies might adapt to lower-throughput lifestyles.

Nate hosts the podcast The Great Simplification, where he has conversations with experts in energy, ecology, government, technology, and the economy to provide a systemic view of the world around us.

After ten years in finance, Nate left Wall Street to study the interrelationships between energy, ecology, and economics—and the implications for human futures. He was the Managing Editor of The Oil Drum, one of the most respected websites for analysis and discussion of global energy supplies and implications of the upcoming energy transition.

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