Movement to phase out fossil fuels picks up steam

A few weeks ago, on Earth Day, I pointed out that the movement to phase out fossil fuels — an absolute necessity to avoid the worst consequences of climate change — is getting an unintended boost from Donald Trump’s immoral and unnecessary war with Iran, where 20 percent of the world’s oil supply is being held up in the Strait of Hormuz.

Since then, a number of prominent prognosticators have noted that the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz could be the beginning of the end of fossil fuels. Here’s what Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman recently wrote:

The global energy transition — the shift from fossil fuels to electrotech, which uses solar, wind and batteries to power an electrified economy — is accelerating. It’s now clear that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz marks an inflection point: the global green energy curve, which was already on a rapidly rising trajectory, has suddenly become even steeper. “Investors,” reports the Financial Times, “are piling into clean energy funds.”

This acceleration isn’t just a consequence of soaring fossil fuel prices. It is also the result of the worldwide realization that, with the end of Pax Americana, depending on imported hydrocarbons is a risk not worth taking. The United States cannot be relied on to keep sea lanes open when cheap drones can take out an oil tanker or a major pipeline. Even relying on oil and gas from America itself is dangerous, since one never knows when an erratic U.S. government – now under the control of a twice-elected malignant narcissist — will try to use energy as a tool of coercion.

The end of our dependency on oil, gas and coal couldn’t come soon enough. As New York Times opinion writer David Wallace-Wells writes, the “monster El Niño” gathering size and strength in the Pacific right now could provide a preview of the climate chaos that awaits us in 2035 if global warming remains on its current trajectory:

[I]f the super El Niño will offer a kind of brief preview of future warming, it will also offer a test of how well prepared and adapted the world is to that future. If droughts intensify across parts of Africa, how much worse will the world’s hunger crisis — already twice as bad as 2019, according to the World Food Program — become? Will the likely wildfires in Australia do as much human damage as the Black Summer of 2019-20, which destroyed thousands of homes, killed dozens of people and forced hundreds of others into military evacuations from beaches encircled by flame?

Wallace-Wells notes that the pain expected from this El Niño could be significant enough to shake the current complacency about climate change, which has faded into the background in the face of all the other self-inflicted crises that have popped up in recent years. “[C]oming during a Donald Trump presidency, this one even more nakedly hostile to climate concern than the last, and on the heels of a war that has illustrated unmistakably the dangers of fossil-fuel dependence and driven up the price of food and energy, I do think a pattern of unmistakable global climate disruptions could do a lot to dislodge our seeming complacency.”

The most encouraging development of late is the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels, which was held in Santa Marta, Colombia, at the end of last month. Representatives from nearly 60 countries, calling themselves the “coalition of the willing,” came together to discuss how they can wean their nations off carbon-based fuels without damaging their economies and displacing workers.

The conference came about over frustration with the process of the annual UN climate meetings — Conference of the Parties known as COP — in which a consensus must be reached with all participating nations in order to adopt goals that can limit and stop future warming. Under those rules, nations that rely on oil and gas to keep their economic engines humming — Saudi Arabia and Russia, for example — can block ambitious initiatives like the phaseout of fossil fuels. Fed up with the stalemate on this much-needed course of action, Colombia and the Netherlands agreed to host last month’s conference.

As the Associated Press reported, “The meeting did not produce binding commitments, but participants said it delivered a set of initial outcomes, including plans for continued cooperation between countries, the creation of working groups on issues such as financing and labor transitions, and momentum toward future negotiations aimed at coordinating a global phaseout of fossil fuels.”

For developing nations, financing appears to be the biggest hurdle to overcome in phasing out fossil fuels, particularly for countries trapped in overwhelming debt. “What we’re hearing is that they would like to stop expanding fossil fuel production, but they’re being forced into new oil and gas and coal projects just to feed their debt,” Tzeporah Berman, founder and chair of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, told AP.

While the conference was unfolding, France announced plans to phase out fossil fuels by 2050. Clear Blue Markets reports the French roadmap aims to eliminate coal by 2030, oil by 2045 and gas by 2050.

The plan includes measures across key sectors, including transport, buildings and electricity. In the transport sector, France is focusing on electrification, seeking to ensure that two out of three new cars sold by 2030 are electric. The government also intends to expand charging infrastructure and promote the use of electric buses and heavy-duty vehicles. Another focus is domestic manufacturing, intending to produce 400,000 electric vehicles by 2027 and one million by 2030 in order to avoid dependence on imported technologies.

In the buildings sector, France is taking steps to reduce the use of fossil fuels for heating. Gas boilers will be banned in new buildings by the end of the year, and the country wants to install one million heat pumps each year by 2030. Furthermore, the use of oil-fired heating systems is expected to decline significantly, with reductions of 60% in residential buildings and 85% in non-residential buildings by 2030. The ultimate goal is to phase out oil-based heating completely by 2035.

Meanwhile, as Trump meets Xi Jinping in Beijing this week, China is dominating the clean technologies sector of the economy while the U.S. doubles down on fossil fuels. The New York Times reports that China, already leading in the manufacture and deployment of solar energy, now has the six largest wind turbine manufacturers in the world. “Energy is a strategic issue in development — our pioneering development of wind power and solar technology has proved to be forward-looking,” Xi said. The Trump administration’s approach to the energy of the future can best be described as backward-looking, as illustrated by blocking 150 wind farm projects by delaying routine military reviews.

There are few winners in Trump’s misadventure in Iran, but one of them has to be China, as more and more nations turn to the Asian powerhouse to supply their clean energy ambitions. And as soaring gas prices spur sales of electric vehicles, China is poised to dominate the EV market, with carmaker BYD offering a model that sells for $8,000 in China.

And the U.S.? Thanks to the Trump administration eliminating federal incentives for EVs, American carmakers have scaled back on the manufacture of these cost-effective alternatives, essentially ceding the EV market to China.

Despite U.S. efforts to stall the clean energy transition, the phaseout of fossil fuels is under way. After the conference in Santa Marta, nations that attended will devise roadmaps to transition away from dirty energy, and they will gather next year in Tuvalu to continue the dialogue that leads to freeing the world from the havoc of our dependence on coal, oil and gas.

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