Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to Rolling Stone, the best way to defeat Putin is renewable energy, which despite being cheaper than coal seems to be taking a long time to manifest.
Putin Is a Fossil-Fuel Gangster. Clean Energy Could Cut Him Off at the Knees
Putin’s war on Ukraine is financed by Russia’s vast oil-and-gas wealth, but the conflict may signal the endgame for the carbon mafia
For decades, world leaders and Big Oil CEOs were happy to turn a blind eye to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s autocratic impulses and fantasies of empire building. They were all fossil-fuel junkies, hooked on the easy money of oil and gas, and Putin had plenty of it. They helped finance pipelines and drilling rigs, and then bought as much oil and gas as he would sell them. For Putin, the cash from fossil fuels fired up his darkest ambitions. It not only helped him build the military force that he sent into Ukraine, it also gave him the means to stash billions in offshore banks that he believed would allow him to weather any economic fallout from the war.
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Among other things, Putin miscalculated how fast the world is changing. Industrial nations are in the midst of what energy geeks like to call “a great transition” away from fossil fuels and toward clean-energy sources. It is driven by the simple and brutal understanding that if the rich, Western world continues to burn fossil fuels in the future the way it has in the past, we will literally cook the planet, making it uninhabitable for life as we know it today. If there is any good news to come out of the horrific carnage inflicted by this war, it’s this: Instead of slowing the transition to clean energy, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine may well have supercharged it. And however the war ends, Putin will pay the price. Russian oil and gas is now forever linked to autocracy, war crimes, and human carnage. “The war marks the end of Russia as an energy superpower,” says Tsafos.
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Predictably, Republicans and their corrupt band of climate crooks and deniers immediately used the invasion of Ukraine as an excuse to deepen our dependence on fossil fuels, not free ourselves from it. They willfully ignored the simple truth that there are better, cheaper ways of powering our world with oil, gas, and coal. To them fossil fuels are the energy equivalent of testosterone. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio tweeted that Biden’s “war on American oil and gas” made Putin stronger. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem told Fox News that “from the very day [Biden] got into the White House, he gave Putin all the power.”
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Read more: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/putin-russia-ukraine-fossil-fuels-climate-change-1319417/
If renewable energy is cheaper than fossil fuel, where is it? How many trillions have been wasted on useless renewables in Europe? Yet that Russian gas still keeps flowing.
Putin gets the joke. So long as European rulers and their cheerleaders cling to the delusion that renewable energy has anything to offer in terms of independence from the Russian gas teat, Putin will have a stranglehold on Europe.
It really doesn’t have to be this way. If Europe ditched their delusional belief in renewables, and embraced energy solutions which actually work, like scaling up coal mining and fracking in the short term, and a French style nuclear programme for the medium to long term, they would not be in the pathetic position begging Putin to maintain the flow of gas, even as Russia’s armies destroy one of their fellow European nations.
Why is this happening? Why are European nations finding it so difficult to behave rationally about energy policy, and take obvious countermeasures in the face of Russia’s energy blackmail, and the very real chance the Ukraine is just the beginning of Putin’s territorial ambitions?
I don’t have a good answer to those questions. But history contains plenty of examples of nations which responded irrationally to problems, and didn’t take obvious measures to counter external threats. Such nations are described in painstaking detail, in books whose titles start with “The fall of…”.
Update (EW): Updated the video link, the old link just got censored by Youtube.
A new brain drain from Russia is needed now, mainly to backfill what has been lost in the West from climate change indoctrination methods. Add 10 more trains a day to Helsinki and some cruise ships to exit.
As usual, the faithful deliver a lot of unsupported assertions.
The dominance of renewables is inevitable.
https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/solar/renewables-are-87-of-new-u-s-generating-capacity-so-far-this-year/?fbclid=IwAR2X0cLvmPjA2Gc1p4e-sVy5GlhjAtbdphPm7zvw5VFsvwu5UFa-wGZsfcA
And…
https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2020/0204/Solar-and-wind-energy-trounced-the-forecasts.-Can-they-do-it-again
And…
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/11/renewables-grew-at-fastest-rate-in-two-decades-last-year-iea-says-in-new-report.html?utm_content=Main&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR1-ZPLmtagdWO4_vl9aFs7S9CIFGlSmCHvWRHVyXTPsHesXUsOh33JZFCA#Echobox=1620742983
And…
https://cleantechnica.com/2021/02/20/texas-to-add-35-gigawatts-of-wind-solar-in-next-3-years-boosting-grid-resilience/
And…
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z
This is why the fossil fuel shills like Worrall are running in a full panic.
ROFL you greentards are winning so much our emissions are really getting smashed down in leaps and bounds … what was our CO2 emissions again last year?
What is funny is watching you guys dredge up opinion pieces from dropkicks who try to ignore basic data. Try stop reading what others say and look at basic data and what is happening is obvious.
CO2 emissions are going up so much that we should reach Net Zero by around 2035 and the trick is to print enough Carbon Credits by then. The only decreases are accounting tricks and by 2035 the farce will have got so large it will become a hip joke about how many carbon credits do you own?
If fossil fuel shills exist they are kicking your butt, I believe the score was 38Gt to 0Gt last year.
Barry comes on here from time to time to exhibit his total absence of basic numeracy.
numeracy
noun
skill with numbers and mathematics
the skill with numbers analogous to literacy, the skill of reading
the quality of being numerate
numerical skill
skill with numbers and mathematics
Barry, I feel with you, but I can’t help you.
Barry if renewables were any good your fellow travellers wouldn’t have to keep begging for handouts. Renewables are a joke, and no amount of delusional claims otherwise will make any difference to that basic reality.
You are such a clown I have to assume you are secretly Justin Trudeau.
Handy reference guide as to the destructive nature of wind turbines.
https://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/wind-still-making-zero-energy/
The dominance of the Soviet Union is inevitable.
-Leonid Brezhnev, 1965.
When has Rolling Stone been correct about anything? I’ve been hearing this renewable nonsense for more than 30 years and things are little changed since then.
“Who run Barter town” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hgq4w4dqKsU&t=5s
Putin!
Yep – excellent example, one of my favourite films. Very applicable.
sad but true, i have seen Mad Max 2 over 70 times.
CO2 is not a “pollutant,” despite what the EPA declared.
What business, military, etc. puts a prototype into production before it is tested? AND scraps what did work before the prototype is finished?
None.
But the Greens will and have.
Brandon and AOC are the perfect stooges.
Rolling Stone: “there are better, cheaper ways of powering our world with oil, gas, and coal” and it is called Nuclear Power. Anything else is a SCAM.
Even if you accept their description of Putin and oil money, who gets the money for solar and battery storage? China, which is Purim’s biggest competitor in autocratic empire building.
Clowns everywhere
Germany has twice as much generation compared to load as we do here in Alberta, 60% renewable and can’t keep the lights on affordably.
For Barry Anthony
They have twice the amount of generation with less reliability
Explain
Great transition…. pfffttt.
Not even being able to keep up with energy use growth is transition?
My electricity account was given to Shell when my supplier went bust last year. They boast of supplying me with 100% renewable energy and yet my unit cost has gone up 36%!! Yes, I know they are lying about the source of supply as it a scam using bits of paper. BUT…the standing charge has gone up a whopping 73%!!!! Yep, no amount of using candles or washing clothes/dishes by hand can reduce that charge. out of interest I have asked them to explain it but the answer will lie in the fact that keeping our grid from collapsing due to unreliable wind and solar was £2.6bn last year with a one day peak of over £60m. Before the reliability of the grid was undermined it cost £200m a year.
Frank Zappa on Rolling Stone:
“…people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read.”
Punctuation is missing.
there are better, cheaper ways of powering our world:
with oil, gas, and coal
Words missing
Not renewables.
We are here because Angela and Obama put us here.
You can say anything. If they’re going to make a claim like that, then show us the plans of how it will work. And we will expect to see the math.
Rolling Stone appears to have adopted the newspeak of the new Russian Czar Putin the Plunderer. How many innocent lives are they willing to see extinguished while they try to sell their big lie? What’s in it for them that they would turn their back on the truth so completely?
Rolling Stone should stick to writing about entertainment news.