Energy crisis? It isn’t that we have too little oil and gas. It’s that we have too much

(The Guardian, 7 Oct 2022) We have green, cheap alternatives ready and waiting – but first we have to commit to keeping fossil fuels in the ground.

Hurricane Ian has just swept across the Caribbean and the US east coast. It’s likely to become the deadliest hurricane in Florida’s history. The entirety of Cuba lost power for several days; homes have been flattened; and repairing the devastation could cost billions.

Hurricanes are a natural meteorological phenomenon, but one study has already found that the climate emergency directly added 10% more rainfallto Hurricane Ian. Arguably, we are already in the eye of an even bigger, global storm – and with every fraction of a degree of global heating, the damage escalates.

Yet as politicians are preoccupied by the global energy price crisis, they are deliberately failing to join the dots. It is the soaring cost of gas, precipitated by Russia’s devastating war in Ukraine, that has tipped us over into eye-watering energy bills, and put supply volatility under the microscope. We know that fossil fuels are the root cause, and we know that breaking our dependence and keeping them in the ground is our only way out. Yet for some reason, we haven’t stopped digging.

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The Guardian, 7 Oct 2022: Energy crisis? It isn’t that we have too little oil and gas. It’s that we have too much