A report by Kingsmill Bond says the fossil fuel industry could collapse to a fraction of its current value as a result of Covid-19; I assume that the present oil glut and Russia-Saudi price war will play an active role in this as well. (Link is to the Guardian Article, not the original report, which I did not find.)
Demand for fossil fuels has dropped by more than 10% during the lockdown, and the International Energy Agency warns it could get worse. This may be bad news for the world’s economy:
… a blow to fossil fuel companies could send shockwaves through the global economy because their market value makes up a quarter of the world’s equity markets and they owe trillions of dollars to the world’s banks.
Bond continues:
“The bizarre thing is that the fossil fuel incumbents have been so resistant to the idea of change for so long, and put out so much bogus PR, that they risk falling victim to their own rhetoric.”
Can we survive without coal, oil and gas? We better hope so, since the ecosystems we depend on cannot survive with them. To me, this report is obvious evidence of a system that is so locked into a dysfunctional energy source that the system itself — capitalism — is dysfunctional. Can we survive without capitalism? Some of y’all are going to argue that we just need to “fix” it, or that there is no viable alternative to capitalism. Again, we better find one. Capitalism, economic collapse, ecological collapse — they are all one package.
Feel free to comment pro or con — please also be respectful. And whatever you are doing in solidarity with others — keep doing that! We need all of us.
UPDATE:
This is not really an article about replacing fossil fuels with electric powered vehicles — although I concur that that would be a positive step.
The main idea here is that fossil fuels (along with banks) are a lynchpin of corporate economics. So first, if investors lose faith in fossil fuels, they will stop investing in them, which could bring an end to their prominent role in the market. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of fossil fuels in today’s corporate economy. Second, if fossil fuels fall it will likely mean a major economic crash. So while it sounds like good news for the environment — how will the world handle that economically?
Hence the reference to finding alternatives to capitalism. If the only economic system we know (outside of possibly Cuba and the Zapatista’s Lacandona) is failing, what do we do? My thesis is that that system has already failed, because it has failed us environmentally and socially. I do not know if capitalism can recover from a disastrous crash in fossil fuels value. I am convinced that, regardless, we need to replace it.
So I’m putting in a plug here for the best US source that I know on working alternatives: neweconomy.net. I hope more people will read about the New Economy, and support it.
Solidarity
Joel