Hacker News Reader

Comment by BLKNSLVR | Hacker News Reader

I've found it mind boggling for at least a decade (since solar panels started being a relatively normal consumer addition to the home) that a transition to electric and away from fossil fuels hasn't been an, essentially, national security priority for all countries other than those that produce oil.

The dependence, of literally almost everything, on the continuous flow of oil from few parts of the world has been an obvious point of strangulation for longer than I've been alive.

I mean, I understand that it's so entrenched that politics is owned by it, but, hell, it's been, what a week and a bit, and already Australian media is trying to talk down panic about petrol shortages.

The blind leading the blind.

View on HN

Look at who advocated to define natural gas as green in EU. The political block that has done the majority of advocating against fossil fuel industries were also the same block that advocate to maintain existing fossil fuel in the power grid. Those same parties are also the one advocating the need to maintain and expand thermal power stations in order to enable more renewable energy, and a increase in energy transmission between nations in order to address the intermittence problem of renewables.

The other block in contrast are advocating in favor of fossil fuel industries, but are mixed (some in favor, some against) in regard to thermal power stations, and primarily promotes nuclear for the grid. They are also those that usually bring up national security and energy independence, with reduce dependencies on energy trading to maintain the grid. That block voted against the decision to define natural gas as green.

So the political state in EU is that one block promotes fossil fuel in the grid, and the other promotes it in the industries and transportation. We need to be rapidly phasing out fossils usage to mitigate the climate catastrophe, but no side is really willing to give up on what those fossil fuels enable, and that is despite the now many years of wars that have major impact on economy and security.

It's also amazing that, if the rich, non-oil producing countries of the world actually went and transitioned away from oil, these ""problematic"" countries would lose all their power. All the middle eastern militaries are founded by oil an gas exports, the autocratic regimes are kept in power via military might, and the only reason why they matter in the international stage is that they export oil and gas.

Yes indeed.

And of course mitigating the climate catastrophe should be much more entrenched, there's vastly more voters whose lives will be impacted by it than by fortunes of the oil business.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com