Getting Off Fossil Fuels Is the Best Way to Fight Autocracy Abroad and Revitalize Democracy at Home
Welcome to a new era of diminished expectations. That’s what many progressives heard as they read between the lines of Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address. Gone were the nods to the New Deal era, and what was once an ambitious Build Back Better agenda has become the legislative proposal that was not named.
Of course, the list of smaller, still unlikely to be passed domestic proposals will be blocked not just by the intransigent Republicans, but the infamous pair of corporate-owned Democratic Senators who have hung Biden’s best hopes out to dry.
Particularly dismaying was the absence of anything but a passing reference to fighting the climate catastrophe only days after the sixth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change put out its most recent report noting how all the incremental policy changes and empty words of global leaders have left us in a position where the time we have left to effectively adapt to a warming world so we can reduce human suffering, ecosystem collapse, and extinction is quickly slipping away.
The obvious response to this is that the war in Ukraine was the issue of the moment and addressing that urgent world crisis clearly took precedence. Indeed, many political leaders and fossil fuel industry spokespeople have been out front arguing that rather than limiting oil and gas, now is the time to increase domestic production. That way, the argument goes, we will not feel the economic impact of Russian sanctions on our own economy.
And with all the severe restrictions now imposed on Russia, oil and gas are not being aggressively hit precisely because of this fear of a boomerang effect that would harm American consumers. Thus, we are left hoping that other measures will do the trick as we leave the heart of the Russian economy untouched.
But maybe, rather than simply surrendering to the inevitability of our addiction to fossil fuels, there is another option. As Bill McKibben wrote last week in the Guardian, a World War II size mobilization just might do the trick. Speaking to the impotence that many observers feel watching Russia pummel Ukraine, he notes:
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to dramatically reduce Putin’s power. One way, in particular: to get off oil and gas.
This is not a “war for oil and gas” in the sense that too many of America’s Middle East misadventures might plausibly be described. But it is a war underwritten by oil and gas, a war whose most crucial weapon may be oil and gas, a war we can’t fully engage because we remain dependent on oil and gas. If you want to stand with the brave people of Ukraine, you need to find a way to stand against oil and gas.
Russia has a pathetic economy – you can verify that for yourself by looking around your house and seeing how many of the things you use were made within its borders. Today, 60% of its exports are oil and gas; they supply the money that powers the country’s military machine.
Thus, a mass mobilization in Europe and the United States to transform our energy sectors in a way that would free us from the economic power of the petrostate autocrats around the world would both emasculate Putin and stave off the worst impacts of the impending climate disaster.
Amidst all the agonizing and handwringing over what seems to be the emergence of a grim new global order, McKibben asks us to think about meeting the challenge in a transformational fashion: “Imagine not having to worry about what the king of Saudi Arabia thought, or the Koch brothers – access to fossil fuel riches so often produces retrograde thuggery. . . Caring about the people of Ukraine means caring about an end to oil and gas.”
Along with McKibben, I hope against hope. Either that or we can keep on the course we are on where the short-term profits of the fossil fuel industry keep driving us down the suicide path until it’s too late to change direction.