Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
We’re all worshippers of fossil fuels to some degree. It’s not as if all of us willfully have a choice in the matter, but in virtually every product we buy and service we use, somewhere or everywhere along the supply chain there are inputs born of suffering, ecological and human.
Traffic congestion studies make for quick and easy news articles, but they don’t even begin to calculate the true time lost to car culture.
Released smartly in time for the COP27 climate change conference, the film “The Oil Machine”, presents a stark picture of the imperative to cut our use of fossil fuels, in particular crude oil, but moreover of our utter dependency on the “black gold” for practically all aspects of modern civilization.
Scientists, economists and Indigenous activists met in Oxford in September to discuss a challenge central to solving climate change: how can the world rid itself of fossil fuels?
Why can’t we quit fossil fuels tomorrow, and what implications does that have for our way of life given that we are already in a climate emergency?
One thing we know for certain about fossil fuels is that they are a finite resource on this planet—slowly developed in select locations over hundreds of millions of years and being used about a million times faster than the rate of production.
These skirmishes illustrate how deeply interwoven petroleum politics has become with the culture and geopolitics of Russian’s foreign policy. This is not the Cold War. Oil dependence is Putin’s bane, and ours.
While business lobbyists hope to slow down the European Commission’s plans to cut Russian imports and reduce gas consumption, climate policy campaigners want to speed up these efforts.
The only realistic course is to protect the electoral process despite all its flaws, ensure universal voting rights, and push harder than ever to make this country what it has never been: a multiracial, pluralistic democracy.
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.
At a time when the entire world needs to focus on radical climate policy changes, Putin has thrust us into a war that might be as existentially dire as the climate crisis.
Somehow, we need to build a consensus of willingness to face hard trade-offs even as our leaders delay or outright refuse to take responsible action.
