Vladimir Putin's war on Ukraine has shaken up global oil markets. Andrew Nikiforuk writes:
Putin’s ugly war of annihilation in Ukraine has probably ended globalization as we know it, along with our culture’s ignorance of the reality of depleting finite resources. Officially, things have gotten so bad that the Paris-based International Energy Agency is now recommending that citizens drive slowly, work at home, share cars and avoid business travel to conserve some 2.7 million barrels of oil.
The IEA pulled the same plan out of its back pocket during the 2008 financial crisis. Their technocrats now assume that at some point electrification will diminish our dependence on fossil fuels and save economies from damaging volatility and other inconvenient events.
Meanwhile political vultures such as the petrostate of Alberta want to take advantage of the chaos by pressing for more pipelines and oil exports even though the province’s own government could not have balanced its budget without the war in Ukraine.
The empty rhetoric from IEA and the likes of Alberta, however, does not offer real solutions. Putin’s war has merely worsened a structural crisis that our political leaders collectively deny. Cheap fossil fuels built the global economy, burnished its hi-tech political order, energized its complexity and drove all financial flows.
The future of oil is a dark future:
Get ready to spend a much greater share of your income on energy. Prepare for shortages. Expect rampant inflation. Assume chronic supply chain interruptions.
And get ready for the energy fallout: high degrees of political conflict and instability. When people can’t afford drive to work or heat their home, don’t expect rational politics to emerge as a solution. (About 20 per cent of Canadians now spend 10 per cent of their income on energy.)
According to U.S. social critic Nate Hagens, the invasion of Ukraine has accelerated a multifaceted global emergency. That crisis includes biological extinctions, climate upheaval, a population crisis and a technological war on truth. He argues that the “war in Ukraine has shortened the runway leading to the Great Simplification.”
By simplification he means radical decreases in energy consumption necessary to prevent the collapse of biological life systems on the planet. That means the end of globalization, and the relocalizing of economies with a priority on local food security.
If the pandemic closed the door on the illusion of material and energy normalcy, Putin’s war has forever bolted it. And when the world’s largest wheat exporter invades the world’s fifth largest wheat exporter, expect famine to visit parts of the globe.
There will be no quick fix to this mess nor any reliable energy transition, other than radical conservation and de-growth. That path, of course, risks high unemployment and business failures. It will trigger severe civil unrest in the absence of Volodymyr Zelenskyy-like leadership to relocalize our economies.
A dark future indeed.
Image: Art Berman
8 comments:
And once again, 98% of Albertans will say, “it’s over there, it has nothing to do with us”. Anyong
It's hard to see, Anyong, when your eyes are closed.
Ukraine has brought back "the fog of war" to our parlance. I was thinking about that when I realized we're in a fog to be sure, the fog of life. We go from one dire emergency to the next, never pausing long enough to resolve any of them. We imagine we have an inexhaustible supply of BandAids, temporary fixes. There is far too much inertia in our system to permit course changes.
Jared Diamond notes that there is a long history of societies that collapse and it's usually when they are at some zenith. Collapse is abrupt whether it is triggered by war, disease or environmental change.
On the weekend I spent some time revisiting the subject of global soils degradation and food insecurity. It's one of several dire and worsening problems that we manage to ignore.
We face cascading crises, Mound. Their multiplicity and complexity seem to be beyond our comprehension.
" ended globalization as we know it"
We need a unified globe to tackle climate change. That was always a 'long shot' and parochial interests were most likely to prevail in plausible future scenarios.
Today's CDN farce: $9B for climate mitigation and $19B for a fighter jet that no one seems to think, actually works. (And back in 2015 when Jr. was promising electoral reform and environmental reform he also sounded like he would nix the F35-boondoogle.)
All the green talk is 'muscle reflex' at this point or simply greenwashing. By the time the climate disasters become undeniable, it will be too late.
We don't have much time, PoV. And we're going in the wrong direction.
@ MoS.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24232291-100-the-idea-that-there-are-only-100-harvests-left-is-just-a-fantasy/
@ Northern PoV..
Today's CDN farce: $9B for climate mitigation and $19B for a fighter jet that no one seems to think, actually works.
That our government is spending $19 billion on an obvious knee jerk reaction to the events in the Ukraine is proof positive of the amateurism of those we elect.
For, overnight Trudeau has gone from protecting Canadian sovereignty to full fledged support of USA foreign policy that is the expansion of NATO.
As for oil is dead ; not a chance.
The power of the oil companies is greater than most Western governments.
TB
These are not hopeful developments, TB.
Post a Comment