Discussion
"The European Commission has launched a strategy to protect people in the EU from “fossil-fuel price shocks” and accelerate the expansion of “homegrown clean energy”.
The proposals are meant to ensure the EU has enough fuel in the short term, to protect consumers from price rises and – in the longer term – to curb reliance on oil and gas.
Central to the commission’s strategy is a proposal to overhaul the EU’s taxation system so that it favours electricity over gas."
What all the stuff reported in this thread adds up to:
Demand destruction.
As Rebecca Solnit puts it:
"This is how the attack by one petro-state (ours) on another (Iran's) may be turning out to be very bad for petroleum, because the only thing history loves more than a surprise party is irony."
https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/truth-consequences-climate-and-demand-destruction/
Read the Solnit piece first, then the recap by Doctorow, with subtitles:
"As Solnit writes, Trump's stupid war follows on the heels of another unforgivable and cruel blunder: Putin's quagmire in Ukraine, which catapulted Europe into the Gretacene, with a wholesale, continent-wide shift away from fossil fuels to renewables and the devices they power. Now, the rest of the world is following suit."
These nuggets!
"We dig up a lot of fossil fuels. The world consumes seventeen times more fossil fuels in a year than we will require to electrify the planet forever."
"In 2024, America saw its first all-solar powered solar panel recycling factory, which reclaimed 99% of the materials in a panel that was 20% efficient, and then used those materials to make two panels that were each 40% efficient."
Chokepoints
"The age of assuming someone else’s energy will always be available, at a price we can afford, through a route we don’t control, is over.
Solar and wind require no imports from unstable regions, no transit through chokepoints. Every energy minister on earth grasps this now in a way they did not nine weeks ago."
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