Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The renewable energy industry, which until recently was projected to enjoy rapid growth, has run into stiff headwinds as a result of three era-defining events: the COVID-19 pandemic, the resulting global financial contraction and a collapse in oil prices. These are interrelated, mutually reinforcing events.
While most Canadians have been worrying about the COVID-19 pandemic, the drama of collapsing oil prices has upended markets and shaken the budgets of Canada’s petro-dependent provinces: Newfoundland, Saskatchewan, Alberta and B.C.
As I try to explain why Democrats and the clean energy and climate defense sectors proposed a series of climate-related initiatives as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (the Cares Act or Act) which will be signed into law within days. The connection between climate change and stimulus legislation intended to respond to the coronavirus pandemic is not as tenuous as it might seem at first blush.
On March 25, a federal judge tossed out federal permits for the Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL), built to carry over half a million barrels of Bakken crude oil a day from North Dakota, and ordered the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to conduct a full environmental review of the pipeline project.
Pandemics change business-as-usual overnight. Governments mobilise huge resources to tackle the problem and compensate for its impacts. At the same time, people depend on the civil and public domains for advice, protection, health services and the whole infrastructure of response.
Let’s create a living open source project—where collective intelligence informs near and intermediate term mitigation, one that helps us as a culture navigate the narrow path between fantasy and doom. When we see gasoline this summer under $1 per gallon let’s not waste that moment in a Caligula-like orgy of consuming like we used to, but rather, reflect, imagine, and resolve to make America good again.
It’s hardly a surprise that the coronavirus pandemic is controlling politics up and down Pennsylvania from Capitol Hill to the White House. The president assumed a more somber tone during the week, although he continued to make misstatements about the pandemic and what the government was doing about it.
The global oil price has crashed, mainly as a result of the coronavirus (COVID-19), and earlier in the week hit lows not seen for two decades, of around $20 a barrel for WTI and $24 for Brent crude.
I believe we will see a fairly rapid decline in the production of shale oil and gas in the U.S. as a large number of fracking companies go bankrupt. I don’t see investors again being taken in by the promises of industry corporate executives, especially when the best drilling acreage is long gone. That is not a message I expect to hear on NPR.
Long before the COVID-19 outbreak, fracking firms in the Permian Basin were experiencing a downturn. Now the dramatic devaluation of oil prices will likely bring the already declining drilling boom in the country’s shale regions to a near halt.
The world is not doing well in its efforts to meet the existing voluntary goals of the Paris climate accord—targets that collectively were known to be inadequate from the day the accord first came into force.
Having studied, written on and engaged in public discussion about transnational corporations (TNCs), I have reached the conclusion that we are not collectively equipped to think about the kind of power that they represent, the silent way they exercise their specific form of sovereignty and the numerous mechanisms that allow them to circumvent the law wherever they operate.
