IEA Plan Won’t Snip Europe’s Energy Ties To Russia

On March 17, an anti-oil protester held up a Premier League soccer match for 8 minutes after tying himself to a goal post using a plastic zip tie. “I’m about to disrupt a football match and I’m terrified,” Louis McKechnie said in a video posted on the Facebook page of a group that calls itself “Just Stop Oil.”

Neither McKechnie nor anyone else affiliated with the group apparently recognized the irony in the fact that the zip tie used in the stunt was manufactured from oil.

It’s an issue anti-oil protesters run into frequently: How to stage a protest against oil without using any of the thousands of petroleum-based products we use in our daily lives? In 2021, sports apparel maker The North Face refused to make a co-branded jacket for an oilfield service company as a virtue signal to the anti-fossil fuels movement. The North Face became a bit of a laughing stock when many observers pointed to the reality that it is pretty much impossible to find a single item it sells that is not made either entirely or partially from materials and fabrics derived from petroleum.

The fact is that, unless you live in a wooden cabin in a remote area that is heated with wood, has no air-conditioning or any other appliances, grow and kill your own food and you are completely and totally disconnected from modern society, products derived from oil or natural gas play integral roles in your lives. From your iPhone to your televisions to your computers to your appliances to your furniture to your shoes and clothes and makeup and toothpaste and thousands of other daily-use products, you most like use petroleum in dozens of ways every day, even if you drive a Tesla. Oh, and that Tesla contains myriad parts made from petroleum as well.

The reality of modern-day life is that it has been made possible by the production of oil and natural gas and the products derived from it. Our society as we know it simply could not exist without it. Which is why all of these “energy transition” projections and campaign promises by politicians of getting completely off of it – or even reducing its use in any substantial way – are most likely unrealistic.

Lacking any truly scalable alternatives – which, like it or not, is the case in the world today – a successful global campaign to do that by, say, 2050, would almost certainly result in destruction of economic growth and human deprivation on a massive scale. Which is why the narrative surrounding the energy transition increasingly includes discussions about the benefits of economic decline with disturbing frequency.

This whole truth about the energy transition leaves the major proponents of the transition in a bit of a lurch: Unwilling to openly discuss the true limitations of the alternatives they consistently propose, or the distasteful consequences involved in the headlong rush to implement those consequences funded mainly by global debt spending, they are often left to publish advisories of very limited utility, like the one announced by the International Energy Agency (IEA) – the energy arm of the United Nations – last week.

On Friday, the IEA published a report that it says is a roadmap of how countries can reduce oil usage. The report came on the heels of a separate report IEA put out in which it admits what many have been discussing for more than a year now: That the world is facing an imminent oil supply crisis. IEA largely blames that coming crisis on loss of a substantial part of Russian oil from the global market, but many experts have previously projected its inevitability due to a shortage of investment in finding new reserve since 2015.

The IEA’s 10-point plan to cut oil use was accompanied by this illustration:

Given that the largest percentage of oil use comes in the transportation sector, there is nothing inherently wrong with any of these 10 suggestions: They all make some level of sense. Indeed, many of the 10 suggested remedies have already been tried in the past and failed to produce meaningful results. Basically all the rest of them are already being tried today at some scale in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic; yet, global demand for oil continues to rise nonetheless.

Take the first suggestion, to reduce speed limits on highways: America famously tried this in the 1970s during the Jimmy Carter administration. It was an epic failure that everyone hated, one that, like Carter’s equally famous Windfall Profits Tax, was repealed within a handful of years.

Ditto the suggestion to increase car-sharing: America and many other nations have been trying for decades now to convince citizens to share rides to and from work. Those efforts have had limited success, but oil demand has continued to rise even so. The thought you could hope to enforce suggestion #3 – “Car Free Sundays” – in any free society is laughable to anyone who has paid real attention to the massive global protests over COVID mask mandates. It’s a recipe for more social unrest.

Suggestion #8 may be the best of the bunch: “Prefer high-speed and night trains to planes where possible.” California has been trying to build a single high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to San Francisco for 26 years now, since the California High-Speed Rail Authority was established. It took the state 12 years after that just to get the authorizing legislation for the line passed into law. In the intervening 14 years since, the estimated cost of the line has mushroomed from $29 billion to more than $100 billion, and all the state has to show for it thus far is a short operational line between Bakersfield and Fresno.

High-speed rail is a classic energy transition Unicorn: Mainly a fantasy whose costs and obstructions to getting done in non-authoritarian societies are overwhelming.

The main motivator behind these two new IEA reports is the ongoing crisis in Europe. But the thing about Europe’s current crisis is that it is immediate: It is happening now, not 10 or 20 or 100 years from now. The only suggested remedies in the IEA’s list of 10 that might have some immediate impact are those that involve human sacrifice and deprivation, and thus would likely lead to some level of social unrest. All the others, like wider adoption of electric vehicles and other alternatives on a scale that might actually end up reducing Europe’s oil consumption in any appreciable way are years and decades into the future, if they ever manage to achieve that outcome at all.

The governments of the European nations knowingly and willingly allowed their countries to become largely reliant on Russian oil and natural gas imports over the past decades. To a great extent, they did this so that they would be able to avoid exploiting their own known oil and gas resources, thus enabling their politicians to boast at international climate conferences of all the progress they were making at reducing emissions. In doing so, they basically strapped themselves to the Russian energy goal post with a figurative plastic zip tie.

All they really accomplished in doing this was the shifting of those emissions from their countries to Russia, making their own countries reliant on energy supplies from an often-hostile nation in the process. It’s a problem of their own creation, and if these same governments are now looking for proponents of the energy transition like the IEA to help them snip that zip tie, they can expect to remain tied to that goal post for many years to come.