Alexey Vitvitsky/Sputnik via AP
Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Energy Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman Al-Saud arrives for OPEC+ talks in Vienna, Austria, October 5, 2022.
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that the Saudi political system—a wildly corrupt and repressive absolute monarchy whose structure would have been outdated 250 years ago—would exist today without oil.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.
Even brutally murdering an American resident and Washington Post columnist for criticizing the Saudi regime—on the personal orders of dictator Mohammed bin Salman, no less—barely dented the U.S.-Saudi relationship. Only when it cut back oil production in an apparent attempt to help Republicans in the midterm elections by jacking up gas prices have former regime stalwarts like Thomas Friedman started openly abandoning it in droves.
By way of comparison, consider the Faroe Islands, which I visited over the last week. This semi-autonomous part of Denmark is far out in the North Atlantic, so all its electricity must be generated locally. For many years, it relied on dirty fuel oil generators for power, mainly because of transportation convenience. But over the past decade or so, it has invested heavily in renewable power, particularly wind turbines and tidal generators. As a result, last month it generated more than half of its electricity from renewable sources—and on several blustery days, fully 100 percent.
That investment has largely insulated the Faroes from the extreme electricity price increases in Europe, where bills have increased by roughly an order of magnitude across the continent over the last six months. They have some distance to go to get rid of their remaining reliance on fuel oil, as well as gasoline and diesel for transportation, but the government plans to fully decarbonize the power grid at least by 2030. Any rational country that is sick and tired of being jerked around by Putin and MBS would be doing the same.
Now, no source of energy is totally risk-free or without its downsides. Natural disasters can strike down wind and solar installations, and sometimes production is less than expected. Renewables will also require large amounts of copper, lithium, and rare earth elements that are often mined in grim conditions, though at least they are not destroyed when put into solar panels or batteries and hence should be able to be recycled.
But at bottom, a fully decarbonized energy system would be drastically more secure and immune from foreign influence than our current one, reliant as it is on a global commodity market in oil, natural gas, and coal largely at the mercy of a handful of dictators who are equal parts ruthless and stupid.
