Big Oil in the US hopes to pump a lot more oil for the EU to burn while the EU works to expand renewables
Inside Climate News explores what Russia’s oil and gas industries might have to do with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and how this involvement may affect people around the world and their industries and governments — especially where action on the climate emergency is concerned.
Putin’s war machine is fueled by Russian oil and gas. He turns the money from selling these resources into a powerful military capability to project his ego across the world. As did Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Muammar Qaddafi in Libya.
The oil and gas industry makes up as much as one-fifth of Russia’s Gross Domestic Product, which is relatively small, less than half the size of the GDP of the United Kingdom, even though it has more than double the population. Oil and gas accounts for 60 percent of the nation’s exports and 30 percent of federal budget revenue, giving Putin a large pot of money for which he is not accountable to citizen taxpayers.
From the article:
A convoy of Russian military vehicles is seen as the vehicles move towards border in Donbas region of eastern Ukraine on Feb. 23, 2022 in Russian border city Rostov. Credit: Stringer/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images via Inside Climate News
In addition to the immediate events of driving fuel prices through the roof, the US petrochemical industry is taking advantage of the situation to expand their export infrastructure in hopes to lock in future supply contracts (and the associated carbon emissions) for years to come. Putin has done them a great favor by creating marvelous new opportunities for their businesses.
As explained in the article Putin’s War has a range of other effects on the American fossil fuel industry. What is not discussed in this article, is that the war is also providing additional incentives to replace fossil fuel power generation with renewable energy resources.
Rather than subsidizing still further expansion of the carbon emissions that are killing Earth’s biosphere, we should take advantage of the price differential between the increasingly costly production and transport of fossil fuels with the rapidly reducing costs of harvesting freely available renewable energy resources to totally eliminate requirements for burning fossil carbon.
Australian prime minister Scott Morrison has committed to mining coal, saying developing economies need Australian coal to grow, after a major report found Australia must keep 95% of its coal reserves in the ground to keep global heating below 1.5C. ‘We will keep mining the resources that we’re able to sell on the world market.’ [Presumably this also applies to gas in the “gas led recovery”.] Though he added: ‘We obviously anticipate that over time world demand for these things may be declining’. Morrison was also asked about news the British government gave up demands Australia make emissions cuts as part of its trade deal.’Well, it was about trade. It wasn’t a climate agreement,’ he said. / Guardian Australia 09/09/2022
To do this most effectively we need to replace our puppet governments and their fellow travelers working for the benefit of fossil fuel industries by electing intelligent and ethical people who are publicly committed to putting action against the climate crisis as their number one priority in Parliament. Vote Climate One’s Traffic Light Voting System is designed to provide you with information about candidates you can use to help you determine your preferences and quickly apply then on your ballot paper when you vote.
Featured image: Russian military weapons destroyed and seized by the Armed Forces of Ukraine. / Uploaded a work by Міністерство внутрішніх справ України from https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=324376199718036&set=pcb.324376259718030 / licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license / Attribution: Mvs.gov.ua
Some call me a 'climate scientist'. I'm not. What I am is an 'Earth systems generalist'.
Born in 1939, I grew up with passionate interests in both science and engineering. I learned to read from my father's university textbooks in geology and paleontology, and dreamed of building nuclear powered starships. Living on a yacht in Southern California I grew up surrounded by (and often immersed in) marine and estuarine ecosystems while my father worked in the aerospace engineering industry.
After studying university physics for three years, dyslexia with numbers convinced me to change my focus to biology. I completed university as an evolutionary biologist (PhD Harvard, 1973). My principal research project involved understanding how species' genetic systems regulated the evolution and speciation of North America's largest and most widespread lizard genus. Then for several years as an academic biologist I taught a range of university subjects as diverse as systematics, biogeography, cytogenetics, comparative anatomy and marine biology.
In Australia, from 1980, I was involved in various activities around the emerging and rapidly evolving microcomputing technologies culminating in 2 years involvement in the computerization of the emerging Bank of Melbourne.
In 1990 I joined a startup engineering company that had just won the contract to build a new generation of 10 frigates for Australia and New Zealand. In 2007 I retired from the head office of Tenix Defence, then Australia's largest defence engineering contractor, after a 17½ year career as a documentation and knowledge management systems analyst and designer. At Tenix I reported to the R&D manager under the GM Engineering, and worked closely with support and systems engineers on the ANZAC Ship Project to solve documentation and engineering change management issues that risked the project 100s of millions of dollars in cost and years of schedule overruns. All 10 ships had been delivered on time, on budget to happy customers against the fixed-price and fixed schedule contract.
Before, during, and after these two main gigs I also did a lot of other things that contribute to my general understanding of complex dynamical systems involving multiple components with non-linear and sometimes chaotically interacting components; e.g., 'Earth systems'.
Earth's Climate System is the global heat engine driven by the transport and conversions of energy between the incoming solar radiation striking the planet, and the infrared radiation of heat away from the planet to the cold dark universe.
As Climate Sentinel News Editor, my task is to identify and understand quirks and problems in the operation of this complex heat engine that threaten human existence, and explain to our readers how they can help to solve some of the critical issues that are threatening their own existence.
