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Hopscothing the world for cleantech headlines this morning, I came upon an op-ed in the New York Times by David Wallace-Wells, who has written extensively on climate change and the politics of energy. He thinks the current war in Iran is a harbinger of something bigger — a recognition by all concerned that fossil fuels are the past, while renewables are the future.
And why not? Despite the protestations of fossil fuel freaks like Chris Wright about how they have lifted millions out of poverty, they have also killed and maimed millions more, not only in wars but in the environmental pollution that sickens people and causes the untimely death of many more every year.
If any readers are in doubt about the unendurable pain left behind when someone dies in warfare, I highly recommend Shrapnel In The Heart, a book by Laura Palmer in which the author interviews the families of those whose names appear on The Wall in Washington, DC. If their stories do not rip your heart out and reduce you to tears, you might be Pete Hegseth’s twin brother.
A Third Energy Shock
I cannot take you behind the paywall at the Times, but I can reproduce a few of the salient parts of Wallace-Wells’ essay. With some editorial license, here is what he wrote:
With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the supply-chain disruptions of Covid, the war in Iran marks the third major energy shock in just a handful of years, years in which fossil loyalists argued that the green transition risked intolerable turmoil and political leaders cooled off on climate urgency in the name of “energy security.”
The world is still feeling the sting of the last shock, and the new one promises a brutal long tail, as well. The head of the International Energy Agency has called the war in Iran “the greatest global energy security threat in history.” One-fifth of the world’s liquefied natural gas flows through the Strait of Hormuz, along with perhaps one-fifth of its oil.
Although the direct costs of the blockade have generated the most attention, the downstream price spikes are just as concerning. Across much of Asia and parts of Africa, fuel shortages and blackouts are likely. The world could be pulled into recession by the force of energy inflation, even if outright conflict subsides soon.
We’ve written about this as well. The costs of almost everything is going to go up, even if the war ended tomorrow. On the up side, perhaps that will pop the AI bubble. On the down side, lack of fertilizer and rising fuel costs are likely to make food more expensive.
Mid-Transition War
Wallace-Wells describes what is happening in Iran as “a new age of resource conflict arising just as the old energy order was being upended but before the new one has really taken hold.” He calls it a “mid-transition war, one that spans the old paradigm of fossil energy and the new paradigm of renewable energy.
He cites the writing of Jason Bordoff and Meghan L. O’Sullivan in Foreign Affairs highlighting that the world has gotten complacent about the availability of oil and gas, and relatively stability and pricing in recent decades. Yet now we have “the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela partly to secure a new source of oil” and “a global energy crisis by trying to bomb a petrostate into regime change.”
On the flip side, he notes, there aren’t any wars being started over solar panels. The same goes for wind turbines and electric motors/batteries. He then brings back a decades-old rhetorical question that isn’t asked enough: “Why continue to rely so heavily on imports from erratic authoritarians overseas when you can instead harvest the bountiful sun, wind, hydropower and geothermal found nearly everywhere on earth?”
Future Conflicts
The transition to a renewable economy may not be peaceful, Wallace-Wells points out. There are other resources that could provoke military responses. As we reported last week, Tehran is so short of water that, before the bombs started falling, a plan was being put in place to relocate the nation’s capitol to the southern coast of Iran where giant desalinization plants would provide the fresh water its citizens so desperately need.
Already in the current war, desalinization plants have been targeted. Unknown to many, most countries in the Middle East are heavily dependent on those facilities. In some places, 90 percent of fresh water comes from them. In the future, access to fresh water may take precedence over access to oil and methane.
Three Steps Forward, Two Steps Back
Despite the obvious reasons for weaning ourselves off our fossil fuel addiction, Wallace-Wells warns the transition is unlikely to proceed quickly, despite the evidence all around us that reliance on fossil fuels is a death sentence for the Earth and every living thing on it.
“Governments across the developing world depend on tax revenue from energy companies or direct funding from state owned fossil fuel enterprises. That funding will dry up more quickly the faster the transition goes, leaving those states precarious and vulnerable. Anytime the world map of literal power changes, the political hierarchy shifts, too,” Wallace-Wells writes.
“This is all happening on a planet in the middle of its own transition, one that may well last thousands or even millions of years and to which few nations have even begun to properly adapt.”
Renewables & War
What should we take away from this essay? Perhaps nothing more than that shifting the conversation from global warming to reining in global conflict depends on the transition to renewables. Only lunatics like Pete Hegseth celebrate armed conflict, and the events of the past month demonstrate he is an incompetent ass who is spending America into a deep economic hole.
Wallace-Wells’ message is that the transition away from fossil fuels will be long and tumultuous, but its outline is beginning to emerge, as the world recoils in horror from the present conflict begun by a braindead president to satisfy his unquenchable ego. America has seen this movie before, when Bush Lite declared God had spoken to him and told him to reorganize the Middle East to America’s liking while expropriating Iraq’s oil.
Fossil fuel wars are like Groundhog Day — a constant repetition of the same old shibboleths with a result that is known well in advance. It is time to stop the madness and get down to the business of building sustainable societies where everyone has access to all the electrical energy they need to live a full and abundant life.
God gave us dominion over the Earth, if you believe what was written more than 2000 years ago, but He did not give us a license to destroy it. He provided us with enough free energy to meet all our needs. Let’s put it to good use and stop the insanity of wars for oil. Our civilization depends on it.
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