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OCTOBER 13, 2022

Cooper on TAP

The Climate Transition Will Do Wonders for National Security

America is getting clubbed in the head with the problems of fossil fuel
dependence.

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outdated 250 years ago-would exist today without oil.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.

~ RYAN COOPER

Follow Ryan Cooper on Twitter

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