![]() ![]() No one in Russia is being bombed but would-be economic refugees are streaming out. Russia has been swiftly cut off from everything from sport to technology to material trade to international banking, and the impact is crushing already and will rapidly grow worse. Despair is a delusion of confidence that asserts it knows what’s comingĪnd in a hyperconnected world, a new equivalent to war has emerged, not as invasion but as exit, blockade, withdrawal and isolation. ![]() What imperial powers should have learned from their wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq is that the will of the people cannot be flattened by bombardment, that hearts and minds are never won that way, and that the damage to your own standing may be what’s most lasting. His mantra seems to be “make Russia great again,” and his heavy assault techniques sometimes worked in the second world war – and even then sometimes didn’t. Putin is fighting a retrograde war in Ukraine with a faith in the determinative political power of violence that is as misplaced as it is widespread. Had anyone described this energy situation a week before it happened, they would have been laughed out of the room. The Nord Stream pipeline company promptly collapsed into bankruptcy. Germany declared that renewables were freedom energy and vowed to accelerate its transition away from fossil fuel and dependence on Russian supplies, and the world acknowledged what climate activists have long been shouting, that fossil fuel is inextricable from corruption and violence. In events not just unforeseen but almost unimaginable until they happened, BP, Shell, Exxon and a number of other major oil companies walked away from their Russian investments and partnerships, which throttles both Russian capacity to extract and to market the stuff. The sheer volatility of fossil fuel has made it a bad investment, and on Tuesday the climate divestment movement celebrated that its efforts have resulted in $40tn being divested from fossil fuel. ![]() Oil prices are high now, but reports, “Shares in Rosneft, Gazprom, Lukoil, and Surgutneftegas collapsed on the London market, losing as much as $190 billion of their combined market capitalization, or 95 percent.” I don’t know if the world has ever seen a crash like that. ![]() Maybe it’s appropriate that it’s Lenin who once said, “There are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen.” The past week was a decade and an earthquake. What history teaches us over and over is that another surprise is coming, and though the invasion of Ukraine wasn’t a surprise to a lot of us, the way it’s unfolded – Russian fumbling, Ukrainian valor, global response – has been astonishing. The pandemic pushed oil prices through the floor – one amazing day in the spring of 2020, Texas crude futures dropped to -$37 per barrel. Second they should mean that people stop saying we can’t make dramatic changes because 2022 seems to be as much about sudden and profound worldwide change as 2020 was. First of all they should shake loose the expectation that we know what will happen, that the world of next week will be pretty much the same as last week. Both the pandemic and the invasion have significant consequences for climate politics. ![]()
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