You can’t ‘Just stop Oil’, but….

If there ever was a situation that require one to listen to both sides, it is this!

We all caught a glimpse of how we would behave in a slight emergency during the early stages of Covid, when the elderly were forcefully shoved aside in supermarkets as people rushed to clear the shelves to boost their stockpile of toilet roll! We may now of course conveniently blot it all out of our memory and move on. However, the simple reality is that we cannot afford emergencies and clearly cannot cope with it, without certain anarchy! So, while these supposedly extreme brand of protestors such as ‘just stop oil’ or ‘extinction rebellion’ may be seen as a nuisance by many, do we really want to face a major crisis/emergency, where we again get to experience the true nature of human beings?

You know it is time to worry, when oil companies are the ones trying to explain how some parts of the world will suffer absolute anguish if wealthier countries just stop oil. What did we do for those countries when oil was/still is booming?! Not much! But in truth, parts of the world that do not presently have access to electricity or safe drinking water, are hardly going to lose much sleep about the importance of wind turbines are they? We presently have the ability to provide solar panels to provide electricity to every household in poor countries but choose not to – afterall, they are not our problem? – but some of these extremely poor countries owe the very little they have, to oil or industries linked to the production of oil, if you take Venezuela or the delta region of Nigeria or the likes of Equitorial Guinea as examples – yes, thanks to widespread corruption, they are still in brutal poverty but take away the oil industry and you might as well just liquidate those hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken folk – it may be very possible to just stop oil in Europe, but has anyone considered the wider implications for those less fortunate folk?

There is absolutely no doubt that the world must avoid climate catastrophe! We simply cannot cope. If a much less severe threat such as Covid demonstrated just how unprepared we are in an emergency, just imagine what the situation would be, if we hit 60 degrees Celsius and trains, planes, vehicles and our infrastructure crumble? People will be tearing each other’s throats out nevermind shoving the elderly in supermarkets! We do not have the infrastructure to cope with a major climatic incident of the proportion we are heading for, if nothing is done about the climate threat. BUT these arbitrary measures ain’t going to crack it! We need technology to help us replace dependency on the identified causative factors be it the heavy use of fossil fuels or other sources of harmful emissions. We need to look at the speed and volume AND RELIABILITY of the alternative sources and find replacement industries for those poor folk in countries who will face the main brunt of the collateral impact of stopping oil! It simply cannot be a forced, unmitigated reaction!

That said, it is perhaps also easy to see why some are calling for these drastic measures, if over the past 50 years, calls to begin taking this matter seriously have been derided and as is always the case with humans, we have to face a catastrophe before snapping into action – by which time, it is usually too late – you again only have to look at the Covid death toll. And then the denials and conspiracy theories set in! I mean, let us for a moment assume Covid was a hoax, well, SOMETHING took thousands of lives right? And if climate change is just doom-mongering by bored middle class folk, OK. But what if they are right?! Why don’t we give them the benefit of the doubt by actually finding less harmful (to the environment) means of carrying on with everything we say they are trying to restrict/impact?! If we can replace clearly less sustainable fuels and sources of energy with cleaner, more sustainable ones, while ensuring we create new industries to avoid causing devastation to those who presently rely so much on the industries that will be impacted, why not?! But to just plough ahead and ‘just stop oil’ without first figuring out how to properly address all the consequences for the less fortunate, the less influential, who are already suffering as it were, would be tantamount to yet another era of colonial thinking. But also, to ignore the obvious signs out there and just keep needling with tiny bits of ineffectual tweaks, while we continue to churn out these harmful, unsustainable energy etc., is also clearly not acceptable! Meeting in the middle AND then accelerating technology, creating replacement enterprise etc., should be the way to go. There are so many brilliant people on both sides of this argument, who are just wasting their brilliance on trying to be right, instead of trying to find less drastic, impossible to implement demands!

Are we doomed? Probably. Unless all the needless bickering turns into more constructive dialogue with much wider considerations. If we haven’t been able to address global poverty – but have instead ended up with poverty turning up in supposedly wealthy countries such as the UK – what realistic chance do we have with this colossal climate challenge, which requires worldwide solutions and not lopsided actions