Energy dependency is a problem for us all, not just Ukraine

The news from Ukraine these days just seems to get worse and worse for the country. Military planes are being shot from the sky by rebels, the eastern half of the country is still trying to secede (despite Russia not being quite so vocally supportive anymore), and the Crimean region seems to have been irreversibly lost to Putin at this point. Now, to top it all off, the Russian energy company Gazprom has turned off Ukraine’s gas supply, claiming that the country has not yet paid what it owes. The only vaguely positive spin on this is that at least it didn’t happen in the middle of the winter.

Now of course this decision by Gazprom is political rather than financial. There has just been a new Ukrainian president elected, in an election that Russia essentially considers void because it doesn’t accept the recent revolution that kicked Yanukovych out of the country. And Russia has a desire to keep flexing its newfound muscle on the international stage, showing the world that it is once again a power that should not be messed with. After all, if countries were cut off for not immediately paying their debts, almost nowhere in the world would have any energy right now.

And that’s part of the problem. As we’ve discussed in previous blogs, our global energy system is no longer working well. It’s based around widespread use of fossil fuels that are increasingly scarce and increasingly controlled by only a few countries around the world. If access to those fuels dries up, countries suddenly find themselves in a whole lot of trouble, often unable to provide even basic services to their people.

It is this energy system that is allowing Russia to bully Ukraine right now. It is also this energy system that led to the US decision to invade Iraq, in an attempt to rewrite the oil-rich Middle East region in their own image, and to gain control of enough fuel supplies to keep their unsustainable economy running for a long time. It is this energy system that allows the OPEC cartel to control prices for ordinary consumers around the world. And it is this energy system that causes us to continually dig for more and more fossil fuels in less and less conventional places – under the Arctic, in the tar sands, in Alaska, and so on.

Almost all countries in the world are far too dependent on oil and gas for their energy needs, and this leaves them far too dependent on one or two key suppliers. This fact is starkly illustrated by the fact that the Gazprom shutdown of Ukraine’s energy supply is worrying the EU, who are concerned that even their superpower bloc may not get access to enough fuel for this year unless the flow from Russia gets turned back on promptly. Instead of self-sufficiency and sustainability, which are the goals that all countries should be striving after, we have dependence on dirty fuels.

Many people make a lot of money from this system; the people who suffer the most from it are those who are already poor. They pay high prices at the gas pumps, or to heat their homes in the west. And in the developing world they suffer from the early effects of climate change, killing their crops, flooding their villages, destroying their livelihoods.

What the Ukraine incident shows is the need for greater self-sufficiency in energy sources for all countries, and the need to focus on alternative energy technologies. Rather than being reliant on Russian gas, Ukraine – and the rest of us – should be focusing on cleaner, greener, renewable technologies that are much more easily accessible throughout the world. In designing a new world energy system over the next few decades, these need to be priorities for the international community.

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Time to change our oil culture

The latest figures coming out of the US suggest that the previous exultation of shale gas may have been severely premature. Shale has been promoted as the answer to the question of US energy independence, with claims that there would be up to 17bn barrels of fuel underneath California alone – enough to keep business-as-usual going on for a very long time, and enough to totally destroy any chance we might have of avoiding catastrophic climate change. There was also the small matter that extracting the shale gas requires the incredibly destructive technique known as fracking, which damages land and water supplies.

However, these new figures suggest that those numbers may have to be cut – by 96%. Yes, the actual amount of shale gas underneath California is likely to be a mere fraction of what was previously being imagined by oil industry executives and climate change denialists. This shows the optimism that often surrounds new fossil fuel discoveries, from the tar sands, to the arctic oil, to the California shale gas deposits. Every time, we hear from people who believe we have solved the problem of peak oil, and every time it eventually turns out that we have merely discovered a way to delay it for a few years while further trashing our environment.

Of course, fracking was never a good idea even before this re-evaluation of the shale reserves. The film Gaslandfamously showed how the contamination caused by fracking for shale could pollute water so badly that you could set it on fire. Fracking has also been accused of responsibility for earthquakes in the area around Blackpool in the northwest of England, and there is an increasingly popular and vociferous campaign against this destructive technique taking place across the UK right now -as we have previously discussed on this blog. You would think that the combination of these facts, along with the new discovery that there is actually not that much shale gas to extract anyway, would put an end to fracking – but it will almost certainly go ahead anyway because our culture seems to be hardwired to choose fossil fuel options ahead of cleaner alternatives.

We need to start addressing this cultural problem urgently. Why do we immediately defer to fossil fuels whenever they become available to us? Why do we seem to have such difficulty accepting that infinite energy sources exist all around us, in the wind, the sun, and the water that keep us alive? There is perhaps a view that alternative technologies are not ‘macho’ enough – a ridiculous proposition of course, but one which seems to have a strange power over decision makers. Or perhaps it is simply a case of the entrenched interests of the oil and gas industry that don’t want us to move on the next technology – even though that is what humankind has done throughout its history.

Whatever the reason, these new figures on shale should be part of the culture-wide jolt that we need to start moving away from fossil fuels. We need to finally understand – truly understand – that there simply isn’t enough oil and gas left in the planet for us to keep up this lifestyle indefinitely. That means we either need to change our lifestyle from the current focus on consumption and comfort, which seems unlikely to happen, or we need to start seriously exploring alternative energy sources rather than wasting our time and money on shale gas and other damaging schemes. This will mean cooperation between nations, it will mean convincing people that fossil fuels are not special, and it will mean making brave policy decision. But it can be done – in fact, it needs to be done, if our other option is the tiny amount of shale that lies in a few rocks under America.

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