Scary energy winter is coming, but don’t blame green energy
Every so often the tectonic geopolitical plates that hold up the world economy suddenly shift in ways that can rattle and destabilize everything on the surface. That’s happening right now in the energy sphere.
Several forces are coming together that could make Vladimir Putin the king of Europe, enable Iran to thumb its nose at America and build an atomic bomb and disrupt European power markets enough that the upcoming United Nations climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, could suffer blackouts owing to too little clean energy.
Natural gas and coal prices in Europe and Asia just hit their highest levels, oil prices in America hit a seven-year high and U.S. gasoline prices are up $1 a gallon from last year. If this winter is as bad as some experts predict, I fear we’ll see a populist backlash to the whole climate/green movement.
How did we get here? In truth, it’s a good-news-badnews story.
The good news is that every major economy has signed onto reducing its carbon footprint by phasing out dirtier fuels to heat homes and to power industries. The bad news is that most nations are doing it in totally uncoordinated ways, from the top down and before the market has produced sufficient clean renewables like wind, solar and hydro.
If you don’t have enough renewables but you want to go green, the next best thing is natural gas, which emits about half as much carbon dioxide as coal (as long as methane is not released in the extraction process). But there is not enough of this transition fuel to go around. So, everyone is scrambling to get more, which is why the European Union’s biggest pipeline gas supplier — Russia — is now in the catbird seat and prices are skyrocketing along with blackouts.
How did the bad-news side of this story emerge so fast?
Blame COVID-19. First, the pandemic erupted and signaled to every major economy that we were headed for a deep recession. This sent prices of all kinds of commodities, including oil and gas, into downward spirals.
But the economy snapped back — thanks to government stimulus programs — far faster than anticipated. And so, too, did demand for energy. But this industry does not ramp up quickly. So, there was not enough natural gas, let alone renewables, to fill in the gap.
America has enough oil and natural gas to meet its own needs for now, but its ability to export liquefied natural gas to help others is limited.
When every country jumps in at once, the price goes crazy. Or the lights go out.
Don’t get me wrong. I am as green as ever. But I’m not a nice green. I am a mean green. Achieving the scale of clean energy that we need requires not only wind, solar and hydro, but also a carbon tax in every major industrial economy, nuclear power and natural gas as a bridge. If you oppose all those, you’re not serious about what scientists tell us needs to be done right now: Put in place enough noncarbon-emitting fuels to manage the destructive aspects of climate change that have become unavoidable so we can avoid those that would be unmanageable.
Meanwhile, though, this energy crisis is coinciding with the stalemate in the talks between the U.S. and Iran about restoring the nuclear deal that Donald Trump recklessly tore up in 2018 — without any alternative plan to curb Iran’s nuclear program. To pressure us, Iran has resumed enriching uranium to levels such that U.S. officials now believe it could be only a few months, or less, away from having enough fissile material for a single bomb.
It would take much longer for Iran to build a warhead and delivery system, but some U.S. officials believe that Iran just wants to make itself a threshold nuclear power, like Japan, where it would stay just a few turns of the screw away from actually having a bomb.
But what if the U.S. or Israel feels it has to strike Iran’s nuclear program in the middle of what could be the worst energy winter since 1973? And what if Iran responds by firing at U.S. oil tankers in the Persian Gulf? Oil and gas prices will go into the stratosphere. So, Iran suddenly has new leverage: Hit us and you bankrupt the world.
If I can figure that out, the Iranians can.
Little darling — it’s gonna be a long, cold, crazy winter.