Nature Commentary: The geopolitics of fossil fuels and renewables reshape the world

[NNadir]

This commentary appears in the recent issue of Nature: The geopolitics of fossil fuels and renewables reshape the world.

The subtitle:

To navigate the long road to net zero, energy researchers must grapple with the lessons of history.

The author is Helen Thompson, a Professor of Political Economics at Cambridge University in the School of Politics and International Studies.

It is probably open sourced, but some excerpts:

With 84% of our energy still coming from oil, coal and gas, much of the transition to renewable energy sources lies ahead. Just because a different future will arrive, it doesn’t meant that the present will simply cede the stage. Renewables do not change the centrality of energy to geopolitics. Nor, given that the energy transition will be a long one, will it quickly end the geopolitics of fossil fuels.

For nearly 200 years, fossil-fuel energy has been central to geopolitics. The relationship between western Europe and China changed decisively in 1839, when Britain deployed coal-fired steam ships in the First Opium War. This move opened up China to a succession of imperial powers. The turn to oil in the twentieth century made the United States the world’s dominant power and began the decline of Europe’s great powers. For the past decade, the United States and Russia have competed with each other to sell gas to Europe, as they did oil at the start of the past century.

Energy makes for dramatic geopolitical conflicts with after-effects that last decades. Take the Suez Crisis in 1956. US president Dwight Eisenhower used his country’s financial might to stop Anglo–French military action against Egypt that was designed to protect western European energy interests in the Middle East. The United States had encouraged these interests, wanting to protect supply from the Western Hemisphere for itself. Aghast that their supposed NATO ally could betray them, several European countries began their turn towards what was then Soviet, and is now Russian, oil. In the 1970s, this Soviet–European energy relationship was extended to gas...

In this century of course, Germany has been sending billions upon billions upon tens of billions of Euros to Putin based on the big, popular and absurd lie that "nuclear energy is 'too dangerous'," and fossil fuels aren't "too dangerous."

We know...we know...

That worked out well, didn't it?

She continues:

...Ever since Russia’s President Vladimir Putin first made it clear in 2008, in Georgia, that he does not accept the borders created by the dissolution of the Soviet Union, this dependency has constrained the European Union’s policy towards Russia. Complementary fossil-fuel interests have also turned China and Russia into tacit allies...

Take whatever you want Vlad, just give us our gas.

Further down:

...There is a discernible fear in Washington DC that an age of green energy will be the age of China. Renewables infrastructure depends heavily on rare-earth minerals, whose production China almost entirely dominates. Deng Xiaoping, a former leader of the Chinese Communist Party, once quipped: “The Middle East has oil and China has rare earths.” Over the past decade, China has also been willing to use this control as a geopolitical weapon, imposing an export ban on all rare earths to Japan in 2010 after a conflict about a fishing trawler in the East China Sea. For the United States, playing catch-up on creating a domestic industry around the extraction of ‘tech metals’ has become a national imperative...

There's something very telling here: If so called "renewable energy" - commonly mislabeled here and elsewhere as "green energy" - is dependent on mining elements subject to depletion, how then is it "renewable?"

Unfortunately, this late in the game, with the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide being around 419 ppm and heading for the April or May new record levels, we are still involved with the lie.

There is no such thing as "renewable energy." There is only sustainable energy and if we're claiming that wind and solar are sustainable if only we all buy electric cars, we are embracing an untruth that is the equivalent of announcing that Bill Gates is putting mind control electronics in Covid vaccines.

Sorry, but that's how I see it.