Let me review some news over the past week. First, Vladimir Putin has escalated his war of aggression in Ukraine in response to Russian defeats in the field by lobbing rockets and bombs randomly into civilian neighborhoods in Kyiv and other cities—a blatant war crime. Second, the Saudi dictatorship defiantly brushed off criticism from the United States and others over its decision to lead oil-exporting nations in OPEC+ to cut production by two million barrels per day. Third, the latest inflation report showed unexpectedly high price increases, again, driven in part by high energy costs as Europe, which has been largely cut off from Russian energy supplies, bids up the price of liquefied natural gas.
That’s carbon energy for you. It enables the worst dictatorships on the planet, and puts nations at a high risk of energy shortages and wild price fluctuations. But conversely, we see that abandoning fossil fuels for solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear, and other zero-carbon technologies will not just help with climate change, it will also enormously improve national security.
The current war in Ukraine is not the first time that Putin has abused the power Russia’s vast carbon reserves grant him. He also invaded Georgia in 2008 and annexed Crimea in 2014—both times when oil and gas prices were high. In those instances, Putin gambled that the world would let him get away with it, and he was right, which may have enabled his current disastrous blunder.
Saudi Arabia’s behavior has been comparably egregious. Fundamentally, there is virtually no chance that the Saudi political system—a wildly corrupt and repressive absolute monarchy whose structure would have been outdated 250 years ago—would exist today without oil. It has leveraged its vast reserves to cultivate a (hitherto) close relationship with the United States, which looked the other way while Saudi clerics spread an extremist version of Islam for decades. After 9/11, the U.S. government quietly suppressed evidence of close connections between some Saudi elites and the hijackers (who were also mostly Saudi). American military power also enabled its deranged yearslong effort to turn Yemen into a humanitarian nightmare, though the Biden administration has helped negotiate a cease-fire that recently lapsed.
R&I – TxPAT
One of the Exploited
Article URL : https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/climate-transition-will-do-wonders-for-national-security/