The Ukraine war proves it:
The West needs to end its reckless war on energy
Maybe now the West will wake up to the foolishness of its war on energy, which has left it badly dependent on the Kremlin Killer and other scum for oil and gas.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is creating ginormous energy-related headaches for Europe, with Germany moving to ration natural gas amid looming shortages, along with sky-high prices (particularly on oil and gas at the pump) there and here.
Yet energy prices were surging well before the war, largely thanks to the West’s attempts to do away with its own fossil-fuel industries, despite the lack of viable alternatives. That’s especially true in Europe, which has been madly racing away from gas and oil — closing natural-gas plants, for example, and discouraging investment. Germany has even moved away from nuclear energy.
Yet the West lacks anything like enough substitutes to handle its energy needs. Besides, renewables like solar or wind power are unreliable, as Europe learned the hard way over the past year or so when both sunshine and wind were in short supply. The Ukraine war has only driven home those points.
Germany, of course, has long known renewables won’t cut it, which is why it’s sought to buy ever-increasing amounts of natural gas from Vladimir Putin, with the help of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. That’s left it foolishly reliant on him.
In 2018, President Donald Trump said in a UN speech, “Germany will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course,” and German ambassadors laughed.
Indeed, Russia’s been supplying 30% to 40% of Europe’s energy needs — which is why it’s been so hard for the European Union to cut off Russian oil and gas in wake of the war.
Meanwhile, as prices at US pumps spike, President Joe Biden’s been reduced to begging OPEC and thugs like Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro for more oil, as well as stunts like raiding the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve, as he did again Thursday. Lord knows what perilous concessions his team’s offering Tehran to restore the flawed 2015 nuclear deal, with the hope of new oil supplies from Iran.
To help Europe, Biden announced a deal to supply it with an extra 15 billion cubic meters of liquefied natural gas this year. Yet LNG plants in America are already at capacity, and anyway that amount won’t come close to replacing the 155 bcm Russia provides. And though America has plenty more gas, restrictions on drilling, fracking, gas pipelines, new LNG facilities and the like stand in the way of larger output.
Heck, the European Union could produce more oil itself — if its western members lifted their foolish, unscientific bans on fracking. (Same for high-energy-cost US states such as California and New York, an issue we’ll return to this week.)
It’s time for the West to acknowledge an inconvenient truth: We will all need carbon-based fuel (and nuclear energy) for the foreseeable future. Refusing to exploit our own resources simply leaves us buying from, and enabling, the world’s most vile regimes.