The Last Oil War
"Demand destruction" is coming and we desperately need it
Hello friends.
Come out to No Kings tomorrow. I'm rolling deep in NYC with kids, teenagers and snacks.
https://www.nokings.org/
What started on February 28 might not technically be World War 3—too soon to call. But it is undoubtedly a global war.
A friend in central Israel who loves to cook, posted recently about life under air raids: “I have to remember to move pots to a smaller burner so they can keep cooking without burning while I’m in a shelter. Baking is trickier – 10-15 minutes can really ruin your cake, so I try to wait until right after a siren to put stuff in.”
In Tehran, meanwhile, they wish they had sirens, or shelters to go to. People are suspended between fear of foreign attacks and fear of their own government, writes Bahareh Sahebi in Global Voices. “There are no widespread public shelters, no functioning national system of bomb shelters, and in many areas, no warning sirens…In some cities, residents describe gathering on rooftops at night to watch missiles cross the sky, believing open air may offer a greater chance of survival than being trapped inside collapsing buildings.”
In Australia there are panic runs at the pumps. A Perth man struck a gas station attendant with his car after the attendant tried to stop him driving off without paying, a crime that’s on the rise.
In the Philippines, gas prices have doubled and the president has declared an energy emergency to last a year. South Korea is restricting driving by license plate. Sri Lanka has declared a weekly holiday on Wednesdays, shuttering schools and offices. The block on the Strait of Hormuz also means $10-15 million in weekly losses from Sri Lankan tea that can’t be exported. In lower Saxony, in north-central Germany, fertilizer prices have spiked 15%. Dow has hiked the price of plastic, and Asian packaging companies are halting production due to a lack of both supplies and fuel.
I am horrified, obviously. I’m grieving for the victims, 1500 so far in Iran, 1000 in Lebanon, dozens across the region, and the West Bank and Gaza too. I’m enraged at the actions of every government engaged in this conflict, their depraved indifference to human life. In the case of the US, our leaders’ obvious stupidity is terrifying as well. I’m anxious about how long this will last. I’m anxious about what the crisis itself is doing to our collective psyches, and the spillover of unrest and violence downstream of the danger, fear and deprivation. Sahebi observes: “Moments like this are not only geopolitical crises. They are psychological ones.”
And I have to admit that here, in my relatively safe bubble, away from the range of missiles, part of me is morbidly fascinated to see this unfold. Even a little excited.
I know this sounds awful, but here’s my thinking and let me know where you disagree. Climate change is inarguably the greatest existential threat to the future of the human species, and civilization as we know it. (Nuclear weapons are another, but the nuclear threat relies on a madman pushing a button, whereas the climate catastrophe continues to unfold on its own momentum unless we exert Herculean effort to stop it. One is a switch yet to be flipped and one is a ball already on its way downhill.)
Current projections have the planet warming 2.6 degrees above baseline within the lifespan of my children. That means “the end of agriculture in the UK and across Europe, drought and monsoon failure in Asia and Africa, lethal heat and humidity.” Lethal heat, like they’re seeing in Phoenix right now.
Fossil fuels, just in the form of air pollution, directly kill 7-8 million people each year. Right now.
When climate-heads say our way of life is unsustainable we mean it can’t go on.
With the massive and ongoing threat to human life in mind, I am philosophically in favor of the mass disruption of fossil fuel use, and even the destruction of fossil fuel infrastructure. I support the Climate Emergency Fund, which backs activists who block roads and chain themselves to gas pumps. I interviewed the 24-year-old writer and star of How to Blow Up A Pipeline, an eco-thriller that adapted the nonfiction book by Andreas Malm, which directly advocates exactly that.
Do I want activists to have to risk their lives, destroy property and be prosecuted as felons? No. Do I think it’s optimal for governments to bomb gas fields and tankers, and for a little girl in Bangladesh not to be able to go to school because her dad can’t afford petrol for the motorbike? Obviously not. The first two weeks of the war caused more carbon pollution than the country of Iceland does in a year.
But the shit needs to stay in the ground. Period. And every passing day now just drives home how unsafe, unstable, and expensive fossil fuels are—and how unfair, in a globalized economy with concentrated wealth, power, and development in the hands of a few.
The term used by market analysts to describe what’s happening is “demand destruction”. As long as the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, the question is: “How high a price do you need for the global economy to use something like 10 million barrels a day less of oil?”
The only bright spot in a very scary, chaotic situation, is that we do have alternatives, and people around the world are waking up and embracing the moment.
The European Union’s energy commissioner:
It’s full steam ahead on renewables, with no wavering and no second thoughts. Solar and, even more so, offshore wind power are the key to overcoming current and future shocks and securing the competitiveness that the European Union seeks.
“With a stroke...this war has dramatically increased the power and the influence of those who want to go down the solar route.”
Searches for electric car models are up by 20% since the attack on Iran started three weeks ago, according to CarEdge, a car-buying platform.
We could have gotten here a better way. We could have settled this like adults. I seem to recall that there was a whole, well-publicized international process directed at an orderly, equitable climate transition. America passed legislation just a couple of years ago to embrace the electro-solar-wind future instead of relinquishing the world's energy fate to China. We then turned our backs on that idea because the fossil fuel industry spent $1 billion and bought themselves a president.
They fucked around, and now we’re all finding out. This is the largest oil shock in history and it’s about damn time. I hesitate to call it a silver lining, but it does feel like karma.
I get the perspective of: if it's going to get this bad, then at least maybe it will lead to a more immediate transition away from fossil fuels. My concern is that this is still all occurring within our existing social, political, and economic systems, and that real, long-lasting change will require remaking those systems. Though maybe this global turmoil will lead to that as well.