energy

content/gemlog/2022/05/09/energy.gmi

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+# Energy
+
+We should be on a war footing. 
+
+Our approach to the war in Ukraine so far has been one of platitudes. Refusing to stand up NATO forces against the onslaught of the Russian war machine manages the risk of a third world war, but the response Western states take instead is violent, weak, and fundamentally ineffective if we consider what our actual goals are.
+
+Every day we receive news of another hundred million, another billion in arms packages for Ukraine, in training and intelligence delivered by our own well-equipped armed forces, and 'everything we can' short of actually deploying troops and responding with the same force we see Putin unafraid to use. Physical force is very much in play - the Ukrainians will fight for their children, their homeland, until the last breath, but they cannot win against a superior foe, only delay the inevitable. To supply guns, bombs, tanks and planes, to share with Ukraine our satellite intelligence is a rousing and inspiring tale, and we can pat ourselves on the back for cheering the good fight from the sidelines, all without setting our own feet in the arena. 
+
+It is only an orgasm of morbidity, of defence executives rubbing their hands their hands with glee at package after package of public funds to send Javelins and F-35s into the fray. It does not matter that we've excluded Russia from SWIFT, nor that we've impounded the superyachts of the mega-rich, nor that we've imposed sanctions on Putin's friends and family, or that the ruble is propped up domestically by state banks, when we still depend on Russian energy and accept no real change to our own business as usual.
+
+Shells fall, hospitals burn and children die in Ukraine, and we are glad that the violence is contained on not-long-to-be Ukrainian soil. But the fight is so clearly not a nationalist contest between Ukrainian and Russian. The fight is between the rule-by-force authoritarianism and the liberal democracy of the West, which for all its flaws - and there are many - is better than life under the boot of He Who Holds The Bigger Stick.
+
+Because of our alliances, because of wars fought a century past, because of our overenthusiastic defence complexes, we are not losing our fathers and sons, we are not evacuating busloads of civilians from confinement underground, we are not watching our cities reduced to rubble. As summer begins to settle in and we emerge from another long, dark and isolating winter, we do not feel that we are at war. But maybe we should.
+
+The exclusion of Russian oil from our lifestyle should be absolute and non-negotiable. As it stands, we dance around the issue and work out timelines, feasibilities, technicalities about how quickly we could maybe reduce our requirements perhaps by the middle of the decade. We try to work out what is realistic, based on the lifestyles we're accustomed to, based on our production, our economies, our international dependencies, commitments and supply chains. This is backwards.
+
+When we were last under threat, from Hitler, we didn't have the luxury of time to consider what was possible or realistic - the enemy was at the gates, in our skies, in our minds. The same is true now, if only we would tell ourselves such a story, to let ourselves see the threat for what it is. Likewise, today, we do not have time to dawdle, to work out a minimum-impact approach. Every day we delay real action costs the lives of hundreds or thousands of Ukrainians, escalates the terror and emboldens the Russian war machine, inefficient and grinding though it may be, grind on it will. As it is we are appeasing a dictator, and the outlook is that we will continue the appeasement until there is nothing left of Ukraine but unexploded shells and stories, and Russia gears up for the next special military operation.
+
+To go to war is not merely to launch missiles at the enemy or to roll tanks down their streets. Indeed if Putin is to be believed such an approach would be ineffective and dangerous. To go to war is to light a fire in the heart of a people, united in community to take massive, drastic action. For us, this means to first arrest our dependence on Russian oil and gas, and then to deal with the consequences.
+
+We know how to do deal with them - we need an emergency programme of insulation, of building renewable energy sources everywhere, unsightly or not, massive retooling and repurposing of our industries. We know it will hurt - it will mean going without power, going without heat while we work to make up for what we've lost. But we must do it. We must do it anyway - the climate crisis has gone nowhere and looms all the more with every passing out-of-season heatwave, every record-breaking storm, every wildfire. But we must do it all the more urgently to rise to the threat of fascism which rears once again its ugly head in Europe.
+
+Ukraine is hurting, and our hearts go out to them. But if we genuinely care about their fight, about the continued existence of our own way of life, we should be hurting too.
+
+

content/gemlog/index.gmi

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 Technical notes mostly but maybe some other stuff later. Practicing writing for when I have something to say.
 
+=> ./2022/05/09/energy.gmi      2022-05-09  Energy
 => ./2022/04/05/git-server.gmi  2022-04-05  A minimal Git server
 
 => ./index.gmi                  TODO-TO-DO  Deploying with SSH and Git