Between the oil industry and the green movement: We continue to fall into the same discourse

It has long been said that definition of insanity it repeatedly does the same thing and expects a different result. By that definition, we are far from reality if we continue to accept what the oil industry and the green movement are telling us all the time and expect different results.

Greens has repeatedly said that because the price of wind and solar power today is as cheap or cheaper than fossil fuels, they won the energy war. Game, set, match: welcome to the green planet.

Oil companies – as has happened in every previous energy crisis since 1973 – say that the only answer to this energy crisis is what they have offered for the past 49 years: drill, drill and drill. Welcome to truth.

Din, both wrong and accepting the repetition of any of these old dogmas is detrimental to us economically, environmentally and geopolitically – especially, in recent times, geopolitically.

Because our continued addiction to fossil fuels reinforces Vladimir Putin’s petro -dictatorship and creates a situation where we are in the West – yes, tell me now – funding on both sides of the war.

We fund our military aid to Ukraine with our taxes and some of America’s allies fund Putin’s army in the purchase of its oil and gas exports.

And if that’s not the meaning of insanity, then I don’t know what is.

Don’t praise yourself: the sins of the green movement and the oil industry are not the same. Vegetables are trying to solve a real problem that threatens the planet, though they are surpassed by their ambition.

Oil and coal companies know that what they are doing is incompatible with a stable and healthy environment. Yes, they are right that without them the world economy would not exist today. But unless they use their immense engineering talents to become energy companies, not just fossil fuels, there is no viable economy tomorrow.

Let’s look at both. For a very long time, so many in the green movement have discussed the urgently needed change we need to make from fossil fuels to renewable energy. as if flipping the switch -we just need to abandon oil, naphtha, coal and nuclear energy- and do it NOW, without putting the kind of switching mechanisms, clean energy sources and market incentives needed to make such a change. our massive energy system.

It was Germany of 2011, which suddenly decided, after the Fukushima accident, the progressive closure of its 17 nuclear reactors, relatively clean and reliable, providing approximately 25% of the country’s electricity.

This, despite the fact that Germany does not have enough solar, wind, geothermal or hydroelectric power to replace that nuclear power. And now burns more coal and gas.

A 2019 working paper for the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research found that in Germany, “nuclear electrical power output lost due to phase-out has been replaced primarily by coal production and net electricity imports.”

Its social value switch from nuclear power to coal This is approximately 12,000 million dollars a year. More than 70% of this cost comes from the increased risk of death associated with exposure to local air pollution emitted from burning fossil fuels. “

Currently, the European Union has drawn up a plan to end its addiction to Russia’s oil and gas by 2027, but in the meantime, Putin is laughing on his way to the bank.

As CNN reported in April, a report by the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air cited: “Russia’s revenue from fossil fuel exports to the European Union was removed in the first two months of the invasion of Ukraine“, up to 46,300 million dollars.

This is more than double the amount of Russia’s energy imported by the EU in the same two-month period last year.

This is not because the volume of EU imports has doubled. Ang rising oil and gas prices the reason for most of that increase. In other words, Putin started a war that creates instability, that drives up oil prices, so earn twice the money in the same amount of oil.

Although Germany abandoned nuclear power before it had a safety net of sufficiently clean alternatives, it undertook a serious and determined search for them.

In fact, the whole world owes a huge debt to Germany for doing so lower the price of solar panels and wind turbines thanks to the subsidies and tax incentives it created.

In Germanywind turbines, solar panels and other renewable energy accounted for 54% of energy consumption in the previous months of January and February, which is impressive. By 2021, renewable energy sources will represent only 12% of the total energy consumed in the United States.

Even, the most important fraud of the green movement – of which I am proud, if complaining, member – is to say to myself that, as the price of wind and solar technology has fallen so low now that it can beat coal and natural gas in most markets, often even without subsidies, fossil fuels reach “game over”. Sana. HALF THE STORY IS JUST THE PRICE.

If you can’t install transmission lines -to get that solar and wind energy from the vast open spaces where it is generated, to large urban areas where it is needed- and if you can’t reserve more land to install climbing solar and wind farmwhat do you need to replace with coal, gas or nuclear energy, unimportant make your renewables cheaper per kilowatt-hour.

And now transmission is a big problem in the United States and Europe, where many people don’t want to see wind farms, solar fields, power lines – or natural gas pipelines – in your backyard.

Philip Anschutz, and conservative to do big drilling for oil, ”has spent a decade trying to build a potentially profitable $ 3 billion power line called Trans West Express, which will connect its massive new wind farm to Wyoming in the southwestern US. It will provide approximately 2 million customers with renewable energy, ”Bloomberg reported last month.

“America needs thousands of kilometers of new power lines to bring wind and solar power from grasslands and deserts to cities in transition from using fossil fuels. ”

Anschutz, the report added, “spent years securing hundreds of permits and easements from local governments and landowners along the route.” He got all but one: the one from Cross Mountain Ranch, who didn’t want to its blurry view of Colorado will be marked by power lines. So now, “17 years after the project started, without a single cable attached“.

I’m sorry it’s not like that but there is no clean path from brown energy to green energy. The road was paved with cruel compensation. Choose your poison, but grow.

Meanwhile, since the 1973 Arab oil embargo, the big oil companies have basically said in every successive crisis: sure, we need cleaner energy, but you have to understand that you can’t measure up.

Right now we are in an emergency situation, so we need to drill more. The same restraint is heard today, so we risk wasting another oil crisis and will never end our addiction to fossil fuels.

But oil companies are better to be careful, because this opportunity may be different, thanks to more consumers are requesting electric vehicles and more industries are forcing consumers and employees to decarbonize quickly.

McKinsey recently released its Global Energy Outlook 2022, which concluded: “As the world focuses on low -carbon resources, global energy demand for electricity could triple by up to 50% by 2050, and fossil demand fuel could reach a peak starting by 2023, mainly driven by increased use of electric vehicles. ”

Both green and brown need to be realistic: vegetables need to improve their development.

“That means tripling solar power installation rates, nearly doubling long-distance transmission lines, doing everything we can to speed up the transition to the electric car, and starting to launch renewable hydrogen for the industry,” said Hal Harvey, director Executive at Energy Innovation, helping companies and countries move to clean fuel.

And we have to do it fast and smart“while protecting local ecosystems.”

Fossil fuel companies, Harvey told me, “need to change their business model to make it compatible with life on Earth, while they still have a chance. “

For oil companies with large deposits of natural gas – required in this transition because andGas is cleaner than coal-, it means exploiting those deposits but doing so without methane leakage; bagkos, gas becomes as bad as coal

But it also means thinking more seriously about how fossil fuel companies are actually moving toward becoming “energy companies,” not just oil companies, so that they can use their incredible reserves. talent to engineer to provide more energy solutions than ever before. planet and do not heat.

The Stone Age, they say, did not end because we ran out of stones. And the oil age will not end because we are running out of oil. It will end up with millions of barrels still on the ground because we did not use oil for transportation.

oil companies seriously they will anticipate it. Serious petrodictators they will fall into it. We can’t do it anytime soon.

New York Times