The sooner the world moves on from coal, oil and gas power, the better off we’ll all be. Climate and pollution impacts will be reduced, as will energy price and supply volatility, the wealth gap and global conflict.
“But we can’t get off fossil fuels overnight,” people have been saying for at least the past 15,000 overnights! We have to start somewhere, sometime, though — and we have. Energy from wind, solar and geothermal, combined with ever-improving energy storage technologies and capacity, is expanding rapidly worldwide as prices continue to drop. People are starting to see through the politicians who act to benefit fossil fuel oligarchs rather than citizens.
Although the renewable energy revolution has been underway for many years, it’s recently kicked into high gear in part because of wars and conflicts that to a large degree are fuelled by and affect global oil and gas supplies.
A report from global energy think tank Ember draws parallels between 1970s oil shocks and the current energy crisis caused by wars and blockades. The Strait of Hormuz shutdown alone represents “the largest oil supply disruption on record.” But there’s a difference: “For the first time, there are scalable, cost-competitive alternatives. Solar, wind, batteries, EVs and other electrotech offer a permanent route out of fossil dependence.”
It’s still a choice, though, one the fossil fuel companies and their supporters in politics and media are desperately trying to tilt to their favour, and we’re far behind where we should or could be. That’s especially critical at a time when a super El Niño — a weather trend caused by warm temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean — is expected to combine with already record planetary heating to create even more unstable and extreme weather conditions and impacts.
It doesn’t look good.
There could be a small silver lining though. As author and environmentalist Bill McKibben optimistically predicts in one of his indispensable columns, “The havoc unleashed by a super El Niño will coincide with the havoc unleashed by Trump in the Gulf to produce a perfect storm of support for rapid action on getting off fossil fuels.” He cautions, however, that, “My main fear is that this useful moment is coming very late in the game.”
The Ember report notes it’s easier than ever to disrupt oil and gas supplies. “A $20,000 drone can stop a $150 million tanker dead in the water,” the report says, adding that the United States, now a net fossil fuel exporter, “has moved from guarantor to disruptor,” creating a “glaring strategic vulnerability” for importers.
With power from solar plus storage costing a little over one-third the cost of power from liquefied natural gas (US$60 per megawatt hour versus $160), and electric vehicles becoming cost-competitive with gas cars on sticker price (with much lower operating costs), it doesn’t make sense to keep burning fossil fuels.
Ember reports that LNG “faces the same fate as oil did in the 1970s: expensive, insecure and undercut by cheaper competition.”
As McKibben points out, sunlight travels 93 million miles to reach Earth, none of them through the Strait of Hormuz. Because technologies including wind and solar power don’t require diminishing, volatile fuel supplies, they have “near-zero running costs.”
The Ember report also looks at time frames. Nuclear power plants and oil fields can take a decade to develop, at considerable cost in dollars and to the environment. “A solar farm takes 18 months. A rooftop system, a couple of weeks. An EV can be bought and driven home that afternoon.”
The savings in automobile fuel costs alone are substantial. “Replacing oil imports for road transport with EVs could save importers over $600 billion a year — the single largest lever any country has to cut its import bill,” Ember says.
We must still modify our consumption habits. Replacing the two billion gas- and diesel-fuelled private cars now on the road with electric vehicles would just mean “swapping one set of problems for another,” Vince Beiser writes in his book Power Metal — because of the materials and metals required to produce all vehicles.
We need to shift energy systems, but we also need to shift away from our wasteful consumer mindset. The many human-caused crises we’re facing make that increasingly clear.
David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. Written with David Suzuki Foundation Senior Writer and Editor Ian Hanington.
