Europe is in danger of highly damaging “very, very strong conflict and strife” this winter over high energy prices, and should make a short-term return to fossil fuels to head off the threat of civil unrest, the vice-president of the European Commission has warned.
Frans Timmermans, the second most senior official in the EU, said the threat of unrest this winter, a deliberate outcome of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, must take precedence over the climate crisis.
He said: “If our society descends into very, very strong conflict and strife because there is no energy, we’re certainly not going to make our [climate] goals. We’re certainly not going to get where we need to get if the lack of energy leads to strong disruption in our societies, and we need to make sure people are not in the cold in the coming winter.
“We need to make sure we keep our industry, as much as possible, functioning because the one thing that could help Putin is divisions in our society.”
People suffering from the cold this winter because they cannot afford heating would also be disastrous for solving the climate crisis, Timmermans argued in an interview with the Guardian in Brussels.
“I’ve been in politics long enough, over 30 years, to understand that people worry most about the immediate crisis and not about the long-term crisis And if we don’t address the immediate crisis, we will certainly be off-track with the long-term crisis,” he said.
Timmermans said his goal was to reassure the public of the EU, by 1 November at the latest, that they would not face a crisis in heating their homes this winter.
“I honestly believe that if we can’t give that guarantee then society is on edge, as it is everywhere because of high energy prices, inflation, food prices rising rapidly – because of this uncertainty caused by the war,” he said. “Putin is using all the means he has to create strife in our societies, so we have to brace ourselves for a very difficult period.”
Coal would have to be used, he said. “If we were just to say no more coal right now, we wouldn’t be very convincing in some of our member states and we would contribute to tensions within our society getting even higher.”
Energy prices have soared across the world as a result of the Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine, but Europe has been particularly badly hit. Before Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, Germany – the EU’s biggest economy – relied on Russia for the majority of its gas. Overall, Europe depends on Russia for about 40% of its gas.
The German government has started to increase electricity production from coal-fired power stations, the dirtiest form of energy, while allowing the phaseout of nuclear power to continue as planned.
Olaf Scholz, Germany’s chancellor, also insisted that the G7 reverse its stance on banning overseas investment in gas projects to assist in the exploration of new fossil fuel fields in developing countries.
The European parliament also voted this week to class some gas and nuclear power projects as “clean” energy for investment purposes, to the dismay of climate campaigners who worry the climate agenda has been lost amid fears over energy prices.
Governments in all parts of the world are making choices designed to help meet their often-arbitrary climate and ESG goals at the expense of feeding their populations and enabling citizens to keep their homes warm during the winter.
The nation of Sri Lanka has an almost perfect ESG rating of 98.1 on a scale of 100, according to WorldEconomics.com. But the government which had forced the nation to achieve that virtue-signaling target in recent years collapsed over the weekend because it led the country into self-declared bankruptcy, leaving it unable to purchase adequate supplies of fuel and feed its population. Thousands of angry Sri Lankans stormed the presidential residence on Saturday, forcing President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to step down and reportedly flee the country.
Should current trends in global energy supplies continue, Sri Lanka could end up being just a harbinger of larger things to come around the rest of the world in the months and years ahead. Somewhat ironically, an analysis of the full ESG rankings linked above shows that many of the nations with the highest scores are developing nations with the highest degrees of famine risk. Haiti, as an example, has an ESG score of 99, while the well-fed United States stands far down the list at just over 58.
Scrolling thruough today's articles Scott is like a walk through the Twilight Zone. "90% Bots, Drones, "self harm" "ditch fossil fuels" The masses have to be ignorant or stupid to swallow what the globalist are feeding us.
ReplyDeleteAgree--- I wonder if its more of a spiritual blindness at this point - not to see what is happening
ReplyDeleteIt’s a willful ignorance. They purposely ignore the truth because it’s too disruptive to their normal. Everyone I try to alert to what is happening in the world right now says “what can I do about it?” The only logical answer is… turn to God and the truth, the way, and the life! This is the ONLY answer that matters!
ReplyDelete-looking up always, Rebecca