not having billboards lit up all night is probably worth a lot. I'd imagine they also don't keep the lights on in office towers either.

it certainly doesn't explain all of it but idk we don't really have pictures like this of anywhere else from, say, the 1950s

Her point about electrical consumption and its relation to colonialism is also strong

Yeah, and we see this throughout the history of colonialism and imperialism in more modern times - the countries under the most significant embargoes are Iran, Cuba, and The DPRK (off the top of my head).

Energy fuels production. There's no way around that. Production drives development (except when it's purely extractive production, such as Cuba under Batista etc.)

One of the best ways to kick away the ladder is by controlling energy supply to a country. The DPRK has little to no oil supply domestically. Even in countries that do have a major source of oil & gas like Venezuela, the quality of their oil is poor for reasons I'm not going to bore you with and so their refineries require higher quality oil products to turn their domestic oil into usable products, which is why the US started blocking oil imports to Venezuela and (shockingly) there have been a few sabotage attempts on Venezuelan oil refineries in the Maduro era. Also afaik the Venezuelan oil refineries were built to US spec because it was originally a site of US oil imperialism before being nationalised and the US has gone to serious lengths to prevent the supply of parts to Venezuelan refineries, from memory.

This is not unlike the fear mongering over Iran's "nuclear weapons program". I'm in favour of them getting nukes for very obvious reasons but that aside, Iran has been attempting to create a domestically-developed nuclear energy program and Mossad has been acting as the perennial US lapdog by carrying out assassinations of nuclear scientists and technicians who are critical to these efforts while from behind the scenes the US has been keeping its hands mostly clean by using cyberwarfare to conduct sabotage operations. (It's only when significant threats to ISIS that it seems like the US will directly sully its hands and engage in assassinations, e.g. General Qassam Soleimani.)

Iran has historically been pretty open with the UN atomic energy regulatory and inspection body however there's serious suspicion that the US and Pissrael are leveraging the surveillance and intelligence gathering via inspections etc. to coordinate sabotage efforts. Whether this is true or not I cannot attest to the fact but it's no exercise in my imaginatory capacity to consider the prospect of Mossad having nuclear inspectors on the payroll, y'know?

All of this because if you have a so-called rogue state who has energy sovereignty they are capable of meeting the needs of their people and developing themselves to near-peer status economically and militarily.

Russia has energy sovereignty. China has established itself firmly within the international economic order and so they enjoy the privilege of being able to exercise autonomy over thei energy imports. That's already two too many for the US' tastes.

The US cannot tolerate any challenge to its dominance and so it seeks to cripple any rivals - on the soft end of things they enforce poisoned chalice economic policy, with the most obvious examples being the Japanese economy when it threatened to eclipse the US economy going back a few decades, the EU with Russian gas imports especially - it should come as no surprise that the US escalated the situation in Eastern Europe and has just somehow stumbled into causing an energy crisis for Germany to knock them, as the economic centre of the EU, down a peg. Of course the most vulgar examples are the World Bank and the IMF in developing nations - gee, I wonder why Pakistan is pursuing its economic demise at the hands of the IMF right now while Imran Khan's political agenda has been somewhat curtailed by the powers that be? 🤔🤔 Almost like they want to ensure that even if he gets into power again, which is a significant possibility despite the other major political forces in the country unifying against the threat he poses, that he will have an economic shitstorm to weather, especially given that the IMF will be given mandate to conduct low-level economic warfare against Pakistan if it happens to stray too far from US interests. Of course Chinese economic diplomacy is a bit of a wildcard in this situation so it will be interesting to see what develops.

The DPRK suffers under strict conditions for its energy and so it dedicates its scarce energy supply to the highest priorities - agriculture, defence, and economic production so they aren't pissing away energy with light pollution. Shocking, right?

There was sanctions levied against the DPRK in recent years by the UN Security Council. The US pushed for such tight restrictions on energy imports that China vetoed the original proposal on the grounds that it would essentially cause the collapse of the DPRK. If that doesn't tell you everything about how the US uses energy as one of its primary non-military tools for imperialism, I don't know what would.

(Disclaimer that all of this comment has been me just emptying my brain of thoughts that have been rattling around in my skull. None of it has been fact checked to ensure that it's perfectly accurate, hence why I haven't been specific about years and my statements have been a bit vague with regard to numbers so take all this as opinion and not as essay which has accurate sources.)