By Tom Schuster, Clean Energy Programs Director, Sierra Club Pennsylvania Chapter & Jeff Schmidt, Pennsylvania Chapter Executive Committee At-large Member
Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is a humanitarian disaster, and we must do everything we can to minimize the death, destruction, and suffering by undermining his dictatorial regime and bringing an end to the war.
Here at home, the war and our reliance on fossil fuels has caused a painful spike in energy prices, particularly gasoline, as necessary sanctions are limiting the flow of Russian oil and gas to markets outside the country. This is certainly no accident. For decades, Putin has used oil and gas to finance military expansion and as a club to bend world leaders to his will. He’s counting on us to feel pain at the pump because he thinks it will weaken our resolve.
Former Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus recently wrote in The Hill that, “The way to fight Putin, in the long run, is to shift the world economy away from the oil and gas that keeps him affluent, armed, and arrogant. Whatever we do in the days ahead to support European allies… we must also move swiftly to end the world’s addiction to fossil fuels.”
Unfortunately, Pennsylvania’s Republican legislators are taking the exact opposite approach, arguing that we need to maximize fracking and gas exports. Secretary Mabus calls this type of approach “bizarrely contrary to the truth.” They have even gone so far as to urge that Pennsylvania halt its participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a successful program that will cap harmful pollution from power plants and produce hundreds of millions of dollars each year to invest in clean energy jobs for today and a more stable energy economy for our future.
First of all, the idea that Pennsylvania’s retreat from combating climate pollution from our own power plants will do anything to undercut Putin would be laughable if it wasn’t so shameful. In fact, the Department of Defense has long recognized that climate disruption greatly increases security risks throughout the world, so to make that problem even worse is to shoot ourselves in the foot.
Make no mistake, the oil and gas industry and the politicians they control are proposing “solutions” that won’t help anyone but themselves. Time and again, polluters have falsely used geopolitical strife and war to drive increased use of volatile fossil fuels. We know we cannot drill our way to energy independence. We simply have to end our addiction by using less.
Even if we produced more oil domestically, the impact on prices that are determined by international markets would be minimal, but oil company profits would surely reach new heights. If we increase fracked gas exports it would make our own domestic markets more vulnerable to price shocks from international shortages anywhere. More importantly in the short run, it won’t do much to help Ukraine or our European allies. European terminals have no additional capacity to import liquified gas, and expanding them would take many years and billions of dollars of investment. That expansion wouldn’t even make sense given that many European countries are investing in renewable energy and electrification to reduce gas consumption to address the climate crisis.
The hard truth is that there is no quick fix for energy insecurity caused by over-reliance on fossil fuels. The real and permanent solution, which takes time, is to 1) ramp up investments in a transition to clean energy that includes electrification of transportation and building heating, 2) accelerate the build-out of renewable electric generation, and 3) build up domestic supply chains to support these efforts and to protect against future global disruptions. Every bit of progress we make toward these goals reduces the leverage of hostile petro-funded regimes like Putin’s.
If instead we do the oil and gas industry’s bidding and lock ourselves into many years of amped up fossil fuel extraction and dependence, we would not only fail to have any tangible short-term impact on either global energy security or domestic energy prices, we would likely miss our last chance to address the climate crisis. Nearly lost in the flood of news coverage of the war, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its 6th Assessment report on February 28. In the accompanying press release, IPCC co-chair Hans-Otto Pörtner said loud and clear, “The scientific evidence is unequivocal: climate change is a threat to human wellbeing and the health of the planet. Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future.”
We cannot be duped into letting the actions of an authoritarian regime be our unraveling.
This blog was included as part of the April 2022 Sylvanian newsletter. Please click here to check out more articles from this edition!