Frivolity (or is it fanaticism?) in the face of the Russian invasion of Ukraine continues.
Russian troops hadn’t yet begun their full-on assault on Ukraine late Wednesday when the rallying cry came from the American oil and gas industry.
“As crisis looms in Ukraine, U.S. energy leadership is more important than ever,” the American Petroleum Institute, the powerful industry lobby group, wrote on Twitter with a photo that read: “Let’s unleash American energy. Protect our energy security.”
The crux of the industry’s argument is that any effort to restrain drilling in America makes a world already reeling from high oil prices more dependent on oil and gas from Russia, a rival and belligerent fossil fuel superpower.
The industry’s demands have focused on reversing steps the Biden administration has taken to start reining in the production of fossil fuels, the main driver of climate change.
The crux of the industry’s argument is quite right. To be even more specific, the central (but by no means only) issue here is the extent to which some European countries are dependent on Russian natural gas and what that might mean if Putin turned the taps off.
But back to the New York Times:
Environmental groups criticized the industry’s logic. “It’s pretty rich for the oil and gas industry to talk about how reliable fossil fuels are when any big storm that happens, any time a war pops up, their reliability is thrown into question,” said Nathaniel Stinnett, founder and executive director of the Environmental Voter Project, a group that mobilizes voters in elections. “Wars aren’t fought over solar energy. You don’t see these huge price spikes in clean energy,” he said.
It would, I suppose, be impolite to mention that last fall’s spike in gas prices was, in part, caused by the wind being at unusually low levels over the North Sea.
The situation is especially acute in the U.K., where wind is currently providing only 7% of the country’s energy makeup—a steep drop from the 25% it generated on average across 2020.
The U.K.’s offshore wind sector had been a success story of the energy transition, drastically cutting emissions by rolling out 24GW of wind power over the past decade—enough to power 7.2 million homes. But as wind slowed and the price of carbon credits rose to record highs, the electricity market has experienced extreme volatility.
“We have very steep targets for increased renewable energy penetration, and the growing problem alongside of that is this fluctuation in prices that we’re seeing,” says Finlay Clark, an offshore wind analyst from Wood Mackenzie.
Wind energy itself may or may not be cheap (that’s the subject of some debate in the U.K.), but if the wind isn’t blowing, that’s rather besides the point.
I wrote about the broader issues relating to the need to tackle dependence on Russia in the latest Capital Letter.
Here’s an extract:
The first step in reducing this dependence [on Russia] must be to avoid making it any worse. That means suspending any plans to shut down existing (non-Russian) sources of energy. Germany, for example, should not close its remaining three nuclear-power stations this year (and, if it is technically possible, it should reopen the three that it shut down at the end of 2021).
On top of that, other Western countries, including the U.S., should follow France’s lead and either expand or relaunch their nuclear-power programs. But there should be no illusions about how long such an effort will take (or how much it will cost) to make a difference. This is not a quick solution, and nor, incidentally, is doubling down on renewables. Making matters worse, renewables continue to be dogged by technological problems, often related to intermittency (the sun doesn’t always shine, nor does the wind always blow), which have yet to be solved.
The best solution for now is to encourage increased oil and gas production from existing and new fields on both sides of the Atlantic. Europeans need to get over their fear of fracking. And there must be more investment in the infrastructure — from pipelines to LNG facilities — that can ensure that the best use is made of the fossil-fuel resources that we do have. All this will take time. Ending Europe’s dependence on Russia is not an overnight project whatever route is taken, but this will be the quickest, and most economically feasible way of reaching this goal. Climate campaigners and environmentalists will not be thrilled, but, as was noted in a recent NR editorial, they like to emphasize that we have only one planet. True enough, but they “would do well to remember that Putin’s Russia is currently fighting a war over a part of that planet.”