Category Archives: Climate change

Opinions on Climate Change

A Conservative  Wet Nightmare

Capitalism, Green New Deal, Sociology of Knowledge

 

I was hearing a lot about the New Green Deal.  Until I wasn’t hearing anything anymore. The Green New Deal drives Republicans in the US and Conservatives in Canada, apoplectic. That is why Samantha Bee has called the Green New Deal the “Republicans wet nightmare.”

 

Why  don’t we hear about it anymore. Were the criticisms of it from conservatives so radically convincing? Or did interest groups get their away (again)?

Dominant groups invariably react to anything that undermines their dominance with scorn, mockery, and howls of opposition. They think the upstart must be irrational, if not absolutely insane. Listen to their howls. They scream it; they mean it. It makes no sense. None.

This is what the dominant groups in the US did when Roosevelt introduced the original New Deal. It was completely absurd they claimed. We can’t afford it. It will bankrupt the nation. How could anyone say in a time of 25% unemployment that the country must put those people to work? It made absolutely no sense they assured us. Well–they were wrong. Entirely absolutely wrong. Roosevelt has been credited with saving capitalism from its greatest foes–the capitalists! Now they complain similarly about the Green New Deal.

Is that how it will be with the Green New Deal? We have already heard the screams and howls of laughter, mockery and pain.

Karl Mannheim, in his landmark book, Ideology and Utopia, building on an insight of Marx, first pointed out that ruling groups can in their thinking become so intensively interest-bound to a situation that they are no longer able to see certain facts which might tend to undermine their sense of domination.  The ideology of ruling groups often obscures the real condition of society from itself, and often even to those groups that dominate.  The ideology of ruling groups is self-serving.  As a consequence, such groups often do not recognize the unpleasant facts which might detract from their domination.  This is usually accomplished naturally, without conspiracy.  To them, all dissent, as Herbert Marcuse noticed, is irrational, if not insane.

No one likes to lose privileges. That is the long and short of it. In fact, groups with resources, will use those resources to protect their privileges. That does not mean that all their arguments are bogus. It just means we ought to be wary of them. We should, as John Stuart Mill made clear, always look at the other side. Are we getting the whole truth from the privileged groups or are they using their influence to influence those in power to do their bidding?

Over that past 3 decades industries in the oil and gas sector, including some of the richest corporations in the world have spent enormous sums of money to convince political leaders, and even us the mere peons, that what is good for ExxonMobil is good for us too.  Is it?  Is the Green New Deal really that radically subversive? Or are we being sold another bill of goods? As the Sergeant on the television series, Hill Street Blues used to warn the police before they went out on their beat each morning: ‘Be careful out there.”

That was wise advice to the beat cops. That would be wise advice to us peons.

Green New Deal

Green New Deal, Sociology of Knowledge

 

Not many people are talking about the Green New Deal anymore. Is that because its ideas have been destroyed? I think not.

So what is the green new deal?  As Lisa Friedman of the New York times said, “

It has been trumpeted by its supporters as the way to avoid planetary destruction, and vilified by opponents as a socialist plot to take away your ice cream.”

The Green New Deal is a plan championed by some Democrats in the US that lays out a grand plan for tackling climate change. That is of course why it is so controversial. It was introduced in the US by a radical Democrat Representative, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Senator Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, also a Democrat.

Their proposal called on the US government to wean the US off of fossil fuels and curb greenhouse gas emissions across the country while guaranteeing new high paying jobs in clean or green energy industries. At the same time, it called on the government to maintain justice by helping people who would lose their jobs as a result to get new jobs in the green economy.  The resolution also tried to cure societal problems like economic inequality and racial injustice. The resolution wants to ensure that clean air, clean water, and healthy foods are recognized as basic human rights. Sounds great, but is this Pollyanna pie in the sky?

The plan also provides that after a 10 year mobilization to reduce or even eliminated carbon emissions. 100% of American electricity should be delivered by renewable zero emission sources. Every building in the country should be upgraded to be more energy efficient and the country’s transportation system overhauled by investing in electric vehicles and high-speed rail. The American government must invest in job training and new green development, particularly in communities that rely on jobs in fossil fuel industries.

Their resolution was not binding on Congress.

Of course, Republican political leaders mocked the plan as being bone-headed and wildly unrealistic.  Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas has said the deal would force Americans to have to “ride around on high-speed light rail, supposedly powered by unicorn tears.” President Trump said it would take away your “airplane rights.”  Some Republicans said eating meat would be banned and that Democrats wanted to take away your hamburgers!  Horrors! According to Lisa Friedman, “Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming and chairman of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, warned that ice cream, cheeseburgers, and milkshakes would be a thing of the past because under the Green New Deal, “livestock will be banned.” It did not matter that the resolution said none of those things. But such wild claims tamped down the enthusiasm of Democrats who had supported the plan for a Green New Deal.

The Green New Deal is based on  the original New Deal launched by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to help the US recover from the Great Depression in the 1930s. That plan included a series of public works programs to put people who were out of work to work in manual jobs like planting trees, building facilities in National Parks and various public works such as bridges, schools, and other public projects for the common good. Like the Green New Deal that followed, this deal was strongly criticized by the rich as being over the top expensive and would drive the country into bankruptcy. It did no such thing. Many credit it with saving capitalism and helping to pull the country out of the recession.

As an example of criticism from the right, Donald Trump has said the Green  New Deal would cost 100 trillion dollars. Of course, the conservative critics, like Trump ignore the cost of doing nothing to fight climate change as he proposed. Supporters of the Green New Deal say the doing nothing to fight climate change will cost more than the Green New Deal. Here is what Friedman reported in her New York Times article: “Modernizing the electrical grid across the United States could cost as much as $476 billion, yet reap $2 trillion in benefits, according to a 2011 study issued by the Electric Power Research Institute.”

In Vermont they estimated that their plan to convert 100 percent to clean energy would cost $33 billion but now they are finding the state is seeing substantial job growth in clean energy sectors and has said the transition should save the their taxpayers money.

Who is right? Who knows? Not me.

What I do know is that a lot of opposition comes from people who stand to gain a lot money from maintaining the status quo. Sociology of knowledge warns us to be suspicious of such criticism. The reasons for their opposition are obvious. And many of them have spent a lot of money convincing political leaders to do nothing significant about climate change. And they were very successful in doing that, while the rest of us are paying an enormous price for exactly that.

Collective Action or Collective Suicide

Climate change, Environmental Apocalypse

 

 

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has been getting increasingly strident about his chiding the international community about not doing enough to stop climate change. For good reason of course.

 

Guterres said this to the assemble representatives in Berlin:

“We have a choice. Collective action or collective suicide. It is in our hands,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres told leaders from more than 40 countries who had gathered in Berlin for the Petersberg Climate Dialogue.”

 

He seems to have taken a cue from Greta Thunberg that this is an emergency but no one is treating it like an emergency. In reaction to the recent wild fires in Europe and the UK suffering the highest temperature in its history Thunberg tweeted as follows:

“This is not “the new normal”. The climate crisis will continue to escalate and get worse as long as we stick our heads in the sand and prioritise profit and greed over people and planet. We are still sleepwalking towards the edge.”

 

Guterres also said:

 

“Half of humanity is in the danger zone from floods, droughts, extreme storms and wildfires. No nation is immune. Yet we continue to feed our fossil fuel addiction.

What troubles me most is that, in facing this global crisis, we are failing to work together as a multilateral community. Nations continue to play the blame game instead of taking responsibility for our collective future. We cannot continue this way”.

 

 

What troubles me most is that nobody is complaining  about what he said. The leaders and the countries around the world, including Canada, are treating the climate crisis as business as usual. No one seems upset

Those are all pretty strong words. Where is the pretty strong action? Does anyone care? This was the theme of the brilliant recent film Looking Up–i.e. no one cares.  In that film which is a spoof on the climate crisis,  the world is coming to an end  literally no one cares. No one takes it seriously.  TV newspeople try to make it into a fun fact. How is that possible? Nobody cares about environmental apocalypse. Can it be true that no one cares?

It must be true.

The time for change is here and now

Climate change, Social democracy

 

We were all warned about the dangers of climate change in the 1960s. In fact for a while, governments led by Republicans like George Bush Sr. actually took it seriously, until corporate raiders let loose the hounds of PR firms and government lobbyists persuaded politicians  to shelve all talk of doing something about climate change. As a result, we have squandered decades, while businesses that got rich on selling products that increased greenhouse gas emissions got rich.

Yet what are we doing about it? We are subsidizing the fossil fuel industry! As the Guardian reporters Oliver Milman, Andrew Witherspoon, Rita Liu, and Alvin Chang, explained,

“Despite the rapid advance of renewable energy and, more recently, electric vehicles, countries still remain umbilically connected to fossil fuels, subsidizing oil, coal and gas to the tune of around $11m every single minute.”

 

The capitalists from the oil and gas sector have used their vast resources to persuade us and our political leaders to do nothing about climate change for decades and instead subsidize them. That’s why I call them predatory capitalists. I think the name fits. The Guardian reporters reminded us that Lynden Johnson was warned about the dangers of climate change when Joe Biden, a pretty old guy now, was in college. Now that I think about it, I am a pretty old guy and I was in High School at the time.

 

Because  industry funded delays most scientists now say we are headed towards temperature changes of +2.7 degrees, or worse,  even if our countries meet all of their UN climate change pledges, which so far they have shown no inclination to do.

According to the Guardian reporters,

“By the end of this year (2021) the world will have burned through 86% of the carbon “budget” that would allow us just a coin flip’s chance of staying below 1.5C. The Glasgow COP talks will somehow have to bridge this yawning gap, with scientists warning the world will have to cut emissions in half this decade before zeroing them out by 2050.”

 

According to Michael Wehner, who specializes in climate attribution at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, “2.7C would be very bad.” “Not bad” is not a scientific expression but we know it means  not good. Then Amanda Maycock climate dynamics expert from University of Leeds was even more blunt, at that level the planet will become “uninhabitable. We would not want to live in that world” In other words, we are right there. This is what we are now committed to unless we make significant changes and there is no good evidence yet—none—that we will make the necessary changes. Right now, we are committed to making the planet uninhabitable for people.

Apocalypse now.

 

 

There is a Precedent

Climate change, War in Ukraine (2022)

 

Lawyers are usually slaves to precedents.  I don’t consider myself such a slave, but there are places for precedents.  Bill McKibben pointed out, there is a precedent we should consider.  Even though we have got ourselves into a very bad position by supporting monsters like Putin and other autocratic leaders of oil and gas states for so many years, we should be able to stop such support and take a new path even in the midst of a war in Ukraine. Wars are fought on many fronts and that includes the war in Ukraine.

 

One of the fronts against Russia and Putin does not require anyone to die or put their lives in danger. In fact, it involves taking one out of danger by withdrawing from supporting Putin and Russia.  It does however require us to enlist the same kind of efforts we have done in past. For example, in the year before the United States entered the Second World War Canada and the United States transformed the industrial system of North America in an all-out effort to provide the military hardware their forces would require to defeat Germany and Japan. It was an astonishing transformation. For example. Ford Motor Company converted its industrial structures from supplying automobiles to supply aircraft and other military equipment and this was a very significant part of the Allied war effort. At the height of the war, a bomber was produced in the United States every hour! The industrial might of North America became one of the most important instruments of the Allied war effort that led to victory in Europe and Japan.

 

Now we need to transform our economy to produce instruments to fight climate change and convert to green sources such as solar and wind power. We will need a similar effort. We did this before and we can do it again. A bomber is a hugely complicated piece of machinery. Solar panels and wind farms are much easier to produce. As McKibben said,

 

None of this is simple. None of this comes without cost, but add it up against the cost of allowing despots to dominate our politics and then add up the costs of allowing climate change to proceed. The latest economic projections I have seen for allowing climate change to proceed unchecked this century is $550 trillion, which is more money than currently exists on planet earth!

 

Now it is true that some people are undermining solidarity on issues such as this. For example, some politicians running for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada are promising to do away with carbon taxes in Canada and pay rebates to Canadians paying a lot for fuel right now. As in World War II, this is a time to build solidarity and tackle a big problem. It is not a time to hand out baubles to unhappy Conservative supporters. This will require a big effort. We have done it in the past; we can do it again.

 

Bill McKibben said he had trouble feeling confidence right now. When he hears Canadian conservatives begging for relief he gets discouraged. He admitted he was angry with political leaders like Vladimir Putin and Jason Kenney who just want to take windfall profits at such a dangerous time. As he said, referring to leaders in the energy sector, “It is a reminder of just how irresponsible they have been for decade upon decade and that irresponsibility is killing people in Ukraine and is killing the planet and this may be our last good chance to do something about it.”

 

There is a precedent for getting together and tackling a tough job. We can do this. But we must not defer to vested interests.

A Better Way

Climate change, War in Ukraine (2022)

 

Just like Boris Johnson, Alberta’s premier Jason Kenney, has argued that now because of the war in Ukraine we should open the floodgates to Alberta’s oil and gas to flood Europe. Alberta would benefit from that (in the short run at least), but that is not the way to go. That will lead to more misery not a solution. More of the same is rarely a solution to any problem.

 

It is clear that we have made a lot of mistakes.  We have got suckered. Just like every other addict we bought the lies, got sucked in, and now find we have a hefty price to pay. Our addiction to fossil fuels has come at an awesome expense. We have only started to pay that price. What can we do to get off this train?  As Bill McKibben pointed out,

 

“Sun and wind come from everywhere. They are ubiquitous and omnipresent. A world that runs on them won’t have the equivalent of Vladimir Putin. There is no way for a character like Putin to embargo the sun or block the wind. So it is fake realism to pretend the way to stand up to him is to somehow produce more of this stuff. The way to stand up to Putin is to move the world to the way we know it needs to go anyway if we don’t want it to overheat even more disastrously than it already has. This is a choice point. This is a pivot point—the kind of place where we could make a big shift. We’ll see. And Canada is one of the places where we will decide. The oil and gas industry is using this moment to push for more offshore drilling.”

 

We can follow the advice of the oil and gas industry as we have done so often in the past and then pay the price again, as we have also done in the past.  We need to get advice from disinterested parties who don’t stand to make fortunes from our decisions. The pushers of oil and gas don’t have our best interests at heart. This is the time for the right decision, and I believe, we must make a change. Right now. The old ways will merely deepen our dependence on fossil fuels. We know where that leads. We should not listen to dealer in the back alley.

 

We could listen instead to Canada’s Minister of the Environment the Honourable Steven Guilbeault. And guess what? He actually is honourable. He has pointed out clearly that we need to bust the habit.

Now I am not clean here. I like to travel a lot.  My environmental footprint is pretty deep. I have a son who works in the oil and gas industry. I don’t want to see him unemployed.  But, I think we as a community must work with the people who work in the industry to shield them from the blows and direct them to better industries where their talents can be better used. We as a society need to do this together. We can’t just let them hold the bag. That is not justice. And if we don’t have a just society I don’t want it.

 

It will also demand sacrifices. But we must remember the sacrifices the people in Ukraine are making. They make our sacrifices look like pretty thin gruel.

I think a lot of people are willing to pay for higher gas prices if it means we can help the people in Ukraine. Pundits always assume that we are all selfish. I don’t think that is always true. This war is a reminder of our problem.  The war in Ukraine has helped to drive up oil prices, but as McKibben reminded us, the sun is still delivering energy at the same price it did a week ago or a year ago. Same with wind. And the prices of both will be the same next year. Why do we keep paying for the one energy that keeps skyrocketing up from time to time as regularly as wars?

This is a good moment to make the move that we must make anyway. How many more chances will we get before we cause irreparable damage to our planet. That is the approach the oil and gas industry tried to foist on us as they have done so often in the past. By now we know– there is a better way. Let’s take it.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change  told us 6 years ago that we had to cut our emission increases to zero by 2030.  Just recently, their latest scientific report said they were wrong. It is now worse than they thought it would be. We have to make those changes by 2025. That is less than 3 years!  And the alternative as we knew 6 years ago, and still know today, are devastating.  Just ask the Ukrainians. The world acknowledged this 6 years ago. Now we know it is even more urgent. This is the time to do it.

 

Should we listen to the Pushers?

Climate change, War in Ukraine (2022)

 

Ukraine  offers a lesson to all of us—don’t become beholden to autocrats. Ukraine made that mistake; so did much of Europe. Becoming beholden to autocrats is a dangerous thing to do. The clearest example of that is European dependence on oil from dictators.

 

Addicts usually look to the pushers for wisdom. After all, pushers get rich from pushing. They must be smart. Right?  Yes they are smart, at least from their own perspective.

In Canada Jason Kenney the Premier of Alberta wants  us all to be beholden to Alberta and its  oil. Listen to what Jason Kenney said recently at an energy conference in Houston:

 

“We are the natural answer to the global issue of energy security. We have talked for years about how some of the world’s worst regimes have had a growing presence in global energy markets. Revenues generated from those sales have been converted into violence, terrorism, conflict, and global instability. Much of that energy being produced by regimes with radically lower levels of transparency, of environmental standards, not to mention labour and basic human rights standards.”

 

Now I agree it is better to buy fossil fuels from liberal democratic countries than wicked oil barons from the seediest parts of the globe. But that is not the answer. There is a better way.

As Bill McKibben said,

“People like Jason Kenney have been keeping us hooked on fossil fuels for decades. I wrote the first book on climate change which came out 33 years ago. We’ve known for a very long time what we need to do. And if we had done it, if we had been able to overcome the opposition of vested interests  and Jason Kenney is obviously a perfect representative of vested interests… then we would long since have put people like Putin the rear view mirror. He is just making the argument for more of the same because it benefits him. And actually, it is at this point disgusting…”

 

People in the fossil fuel industry have for decades spent a lot of money convincing us not to do anything about climate change and they have profited enormously by those delays. But we have paid, and are paying, a horrible price. Nowhere is that more obvious than Ukraine, but actually we will all be paying that price. Had we ignored their cries 30 years ago the cost of mitigation efforts for climate change today would be much less, and despots like Putin and the King of Arabia would have been starved out years ago. One of the worst things we ever did was to listen to them for 30 years and one of the worst things we could now would to be to listen to them some more. They are pushers pushing our addiction for their benefit and to our peril. These pushers are our enemies not our friends.

If we don’t get out of our addiction now, we will no doubt have an endless series of such wars as the war in Ukraine. As the temperature rises and rises, the world will become increasingly unstable and unsafe. The sooner we stop that train the better we will be. If, as the UN has predicted,  we will have a billion climate refugees on top of the “regular refugees” we will be in a very dangerous place. We won’t have purchased security and stability as Kenney suggests. We will have purchased bedlam instead.

30 years ago, we might have had an excuse to keep on our course. But now wind and solar energy are the cheapest sources of energy. We don’t need to follow the old path to oblivion. Batteries to store that power have also come down. There are still challenges but the old way is not the best way anymore.

There is a better way—get off the addiction to fossil fuels  now.

Will the Next Generation Hate us?

Climate change, War in Ukraine (2022)

 

How can anyone seeing what is happening in Ukraine not realize that all of the countries currently addicted to fossil fuels are on a dangerous path? Is it not obvious that we would all be better off getting off this addiction to fossil fuel?  Does the war in Ukraine not make this absolutely clear?

 

Fossils fuel is concentrated in a few places around the world. As Bill McKibben said in his recent interview by CBC radio,

“That means that the people who live on top of those places, end up with more power than they deserve. Vladimir Putin, the King of Saudi Arabia. It is not as if he is an interesting dude, he executed 81 people with a sword this week, but because he has a lot of oil everyone has to pretend he has something interesting to say. In my country the Koch brothers (one of whom has passed on to his rewards in heaven which he has paid for) our biggest oil and gas barons, biggest land holders in in Alberta’s tar sands in different periods, use up their winnings to buy up a political party to warp America’s political system.”

 

In Alberta they claim their oil is ethical, but sadly, such claims are dubious. Oil and gas money has for decades in Canada and elsewhere funded campaigns to convince us that climate change is not real so that we failed for those decades to do anything about the wolf at our door—i.e. climate change. In time, even those millions from that not so ethical source has proved ineffective at hiding the truth from us of what they have been doing. But in the meantime, those decades of delay have increased the costs of climate change mitigation immeasurably. Oil sector companies have spent a lot of money  to delay political change, while they have earned enormous extra profits as a result, and are leaving us holding the bag to pay for the consequences. I have a hard time agreeing to call that “ethical” activity.

 

Some of us old timers may escape paying the price of that delay by dying, but sadly, our grandchildren will not be so lucky and they will no doubt wonder why our generation could have been so stupid to buy the lies sold to us by unethical oil. Of course, those grandchildren of ours might not be convinced we were stupid. They might come to the conclusion that we were unjust in not bearing the price ourselves even though we got the benefits of cheap oil for those decades. Instead we made the innocent generation pay for our profligacy.

Let’s hope that when the time comes, we are in a place where we don’t hear what they say about us when they learn the truth!

What can an additional billion refugees do?

Climate change, War in Ukraine (2022)

 

Getting off of addiction to fossil fuels is the best weapon to fight the war in Ukraine but it can also be a weapon in the other vital war in which we are engaged—i.e. the war against climate change. 2 days after the war against Ukraine was launched by Russia, the International Panel on Climate Change issued their latest report on Climate Change  which the Secretary-General of the UN Antonio Guterres said was the single most dire study he had ever seen on climate change. And he has seen a lot.

 

First according to UN Secretary-General our current course, even if all promises countries have made are kept, which on the basis of past performance is highly unlikely, we are “firmly on track toward an unliveable world.”   The latest studies show that temperatures on earth will shoot past a key danger point unless greenhouse gas emissions fall faster than countries so far have committed.

 

The UN predicted that we could see a billion refugees from climate change over the next decades. Imagine the havoc a billion  refugees can inflict on our societies.

 

Right now the world is having a hard time trying to absorb the 4 plus million refugees coming out of Ukraine. Multiply that by 200 times! 2 &1/2 million refugees from Ukraine in Poland right now. More are coming. Middle East refugees and South American refugees are still looking for sanctuary. Where are all these people going to go?  Where will an additional billion go? Our world is headed for some serious problems but most of us are looking the other way. We don’t want to see what is in front of us, but blind eyes are seldom very helpful at avoiding problems.

 

We have been paying a lot of attention to the Ukraine, as we should. But our problems do not end there. Not by a long shot. We need to get off fossil fuel addiction or all of us are in trouble, not just Ukrainian refugees.

Fossil Fuels and Despotism go together like shit and flies

Climate change, Environment, War in Ukraine (2014), War in Ukraine (2022)

 

 

In 2022 we in  the west have learned first hand about the ugly consequences of oil and gas addiction. That addiction can lead individuals and countries into some nasty places to deal with some nasty people.

 

Even British Prime Minster, Boris Johnson, not a shining genius, has come to understand that the addiction to oil by western countries, has brought us to disaster. Weaning off this challenge will be particularly difficult. This is especially painful for Europe which is heavily dependent on oil and gas from Putin who has used that money to disrupt Europe like it has not been disrupted since the Second World War. By the time the west had given 1 billion of aid dollars to fight Putin, Europe had paid Putin $35 billion for Russian oil.  Does that make sense?

 

In fact, Prime Minister Johnson made the revelation that he had realized the absurdity of this on a trip to Saudi Arabia  where he gone to try to persuade Arab countries to help out the west by increasing oil production. Of course, why would they do that? These countries liked the new higher oil and gas prices that had started to rise before the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. Naturally, after the invasion, those price rose even more sharply. It sucks to be us in the west. Literally. We were literally left sucking the hind teat.

 

Somebody who understands this is Bill McKibben of the organization 350.org and other activist organizations such as The Third Act, an environmental organization for those of us over 60.  He was interviewed by Mark Kelly on CBC radio’s The Current. He understood clearly that Boris Johnson was taking the wrong approach. It was the traditional approach, but it was badly out of date and all of us must come to understand that. More of the same is what has got us into so much trouble, and continuing that approach will lead us directly to our doom.

 

As McKibben said, “It’s a reminder that fossil fuel and despotism often go hand in hand.” I think a better metaphor would be so say, fossil fuel and despotism go together like shit and flies. As McKibben said,

“The War in Ukraine is not a war for fossil fuel in the way that so many of America’s Middle East adventures have been, but it very much a war about fossil fuel. Vladimir Putin couldn’t have built an army without it. 60% of his export earnings come from oil and gas. You can tell that by looking around your house for something to boycott. There’s nothing there. Maybe a bottle of vodka in the old liquor cabinet. That’s about it. His main weapon for 20 years has been the threat to turn off the taps to western Europe. If we are serious about standing up to Putin we have to figure out a way to end all of our dependence on oil and gas. It’s a global market and as long as we are depending on it, he and people like him, such as the King of Saudi Arabia, the Koch brothers, you name it, are more powerful than they deserve. “

 

For quite some time Alberta has argued that its oil is the only ethical oil. But really, that is like saying, I am ethical because I am better than Jack the Ripper. Not the most convincing argument.

 

The one good thing , as McKibben pointed out, is that this dependency is no longer necessary. “Thanks to science and engineering in the last 10 years, the price of renewable energy has dropped by about 90%! It’s now the cheapest source of energy on earth.”

 

McKibben said we could get off fossil fuels right now if we set our minds to it. We have to act like we are in a war. And we are in a war so that should be easy.  Business as usual, is no longer a viable option. Those, like Boris Johnson who are pushing that are continuing to lead us to disaster. They are only postponing it a little bit. We have to avoid the vested interests that want to keep us hooked. That’s what pushers do. But there is a better way.

It won’t be easy. Europe relies on Russia for about one third of its oil and about 40% of its natural gas. We need more than good intentions to get to the heavenly city of release from this dependency. What do we do to get there?

McKibben  says investments by the American Energy Department have been so successful that millions of heat pumps could be produced in a few months. The technology is there. All we need is the will. And like all addictions, we must resist what appears to be an easier route, but this is really the way to ruin. Heat pumps are really just air conditioners you can also run in reverse. The technology is not complicated, according  to McKibben. They could be installed in Europe quickly. North Americans have a lot of spare capacity and  can also produce a lot of insulation, also needed in Ukraine if we want to resist this addiction controlled by cartels. We in North American should do more than produce weapons Ukraine needs weapons right now, but they also need other weapons to fight their enemies. One of those is to voluntarily cut the oil pipelines depriving their enemy of the funds it needs to oppress them. Only in such a way can people effectively get free from the oppression of people like Putin and his ilk.

Europe and all of us in the developed world must learn there is a better way.