Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
“Some government and business leaders are saying one thing – but doing another,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said. “Simply put, they are lying. And the results will be catastrophic.”
Tens of thousands of Britain’s poorest energy customers could miss out on a chance to bring their bills down before winter – because the government allowed its flagship insulation scheme to run out.
Today I riff on longer term implications of Ukraine/Russia especially with energy and global systems.
Vladimir Putin’s ugly war of annihilation in Ukraine has probably ended globalization as we know it, along with our culture’s ignorance of the reality of depleting finite resources.
The impacts of ‘dangerous exponentials’ – that even some in the finance world now seems to accept might be unsustainable – are an issue that the environment movement has failed to address.
In recent years, while fracking’s supporters were shouting “drill baby drill” the oil industry began lobbying behind the scenes to undercut programs designed to make vehicles more fuel efficient or less reliant on fossil fuels.
Conservative prime ministers are fond of invoking the 1940s spirit of post-war reconstruction when talking about the scale of their climate ambitions.
But Britain wasn’t rebuilt by making ordinary people scramble for scraps from the market – and we won’t see off Putin like that, either.
The European Union’s recent proposals to end imports of Russian gas before 2030 in the wake of the Ukraine invasion are blighted by the bloc’s support for unnecessary and expensive technologies.
Moreover, some degree of decentralisation of our energy system would contribute to local and regional energy resilience, thus providing a necessary buffer against the many storms of a changing global climate that are likely to prevail upon us.
As much as Premier Kenney and other oil and gas boosters wish to promote Canada as the happy alternative to the Russian petrostate, Canadian financial institutions and our oil and gas services have already been tied to Russian interests.
Sudden drops in world oil supplies have a way of focusing the mind. I discuss the abrupt U-turn in American policy toward Venezuela and Iran in this week’s post.
Last year, author and publisher Shaun Kilgore put out a call for stories for a new fiction anthology. The prompt was to write a tale in which life in a modern industrial city grinds to a halt due to a sudden disruption to its power supply.
