Facts, fiction, and Fatih

How desperate times breed desperate propaganda

You didn’t think I’d miss it, did you? The IEA’s Fatih Birol this week wrote an op-ed for the Financial Times, in which he argued that we needed to separate fact from fiction when we talked about the European energy crisis. After that he proceeded to produce between 800 and 1,000 words of glorious fiction.

The first “myth” the head of IEA tried to dispel was Russia’s winning the energy war. Russia may be making more money now, he wrote, but “its short-term revenue gain is more than offset by the loss of both trust and markets that it faces for many years to come.” The next sentence is hilarious, so be warned.

“Moscow is doing itself long-term harm by alienating the EU, its biggest customer by far and a strategic partner,” Fatih Birol wrote.

Europe has not been a partner of any sort to Russia for years. It has been a very loud critic of Russia, a sanctioner of Russia, and an all-round opponent of Russia in geopolitics. Shockingly, Russia has been aware of that, which is the reason it began, again years ago, to distance itself from its “strategic partnership” with Europe.

Birol writes in the comfort of “if I don’t mention it, then it doesn’t exist”, so in the world he paints in his op-ed, neither China, nor India, nor, indeed, the whole BRICS group exist, not to mention the Middle Eastern oil states.

Their existence, after all, is quite inconvenient for the narrative that Russia is losing on all fronts and the whole world is against it (it’s a small world, the world of Birol and co.). It is an especially inconvenient existence given that the IEA itself has said the developing world, featuring India and China, will lead long-term oil and gas demand.

Besides the fictional lack of alternative trade partners for Russia, Birol also laments the expected failure of its future oil and gas plans. “The absence of western companies, technologies and service providers as a result of sanctions presents substantial risks for the country’s capacity to exploit those resources,” he writes.

It’s a miracle Russia had any oil and gas industry before the fall of the USSR, which is when it got access to western technologies, isn’t it? And it’s so inconvenient there are people who remember this industry existed before the western companies with the technology and the services stepped onto the Russia scene. The mention of China, the country that develops its own fracking technology, would also be quite awkward so I won’t make it.

Moving on to the second “myth” Birol heroically tries to bust at great personal hygiene risk, has to do with clean energy. Here’s how he’s phrased it: “The second fallacy is that today’s global energy crisis is a clean energy crisis. This is an absurd claim.”

Using strongly emotional words is one of the basics in any propaganda textbook, not that I’ve seen any. Hence the “absurd claim” declaration — if you call it absurd, it becomes absurd. In the best-case scenario.

But this is not the best-case scenario for Birol because the agency he runs has already compromised its impartiality on too many occasions to matter. Still, shredding his “arguments” is enjoyable.

“I talk to energy policymakers all the time and none of them complains of relying too much on clean energy,” Birol says. “On the contrary, they wish they had more. They regret not moving faster to build solar and wind plants, to improve the energy efficiency of buildings and vehicles or to extend the lifetime of nuclear plants.”

Well, I would never in a million years expect a European energy policymaker to complain about too much wind and solar. European energy policymakers are an army of transitioners and straying from the path would result in them no longer being European energy policymakers.

Yet I wonder if Birol’s spoken to, say, Germany’s Olaf Scholz recently, after the country raised the share of coal it uses for power generation to a third of the total. Scholz’ Germany has a lot of wind and solar. Still, it’s not enough because it can never be enough, being wind and solar.

On the bright side, “The proportion of electricity generated from wind power generation rose by 18 per cent to 25 per cent of all electricity generation, while solar energy production increased 20 per cent.”

Why Germany has been struggling with its energy supply with so much wind and solar, then, becomes a huge mystery. Unless you remember these are averages and not day-by-day energy supply breakdowns.

The current energy crisis in Europe is so clearly causally linked with the clean energy drive that Birol must use outrage-inducing words to shake and hopefully break this clear link. No amount of outrage-inducing words, however, can hide the facts and the facts are that there has been overinvestment in wind and solar and underinvestment in energy security — as in, say, gas supply diversification — while financialising the whole energy market of the European Union.

Despite billions poured into gigawatts of wind and solar capacity, these still account for a small part of energy supply in Europe. Sure, on good, windy or sunny days they can account for a third or more, but on bad days, this drops to near zero as anyone of questionable normality such as myself would know if they followed electricityMap for any length of time.

The third so-called myth Birol sets out to dispel in his op-ed is the following: “The third mistaken idea is that today’s energy crisis is a huge setback that will hinder us from tackling climate change. I don’t see it that way.”

I’m sure we’re all better people for having learned how the head of the IEA sees today’s crisis, so here’s the continuation, which will no doubt shock you.

“This crisis is a stark reminder of the unsustainability of the current energy system, which is dominated by fossil fuels.”

“Never waste a good crisis” is perhaps one of the wisest if most cynical things ever said and nowhere is it truer than in the energy transition ranks. The argument that any energy crisis is a crisis of fossil fuels is one of the strongest in those ranks because it does have some sound grounding.

There is enough oil and gas in the world to last us for quite a while unless our consumption spirals out of control. But even if it does, prices will control consumption and they would control it in a downward direction.

The problem is, of course, that this oil and gas supply is not harmoniously distributed among consuming countries. It is often the case that a large consumer depends on countries it does not necessarily consider friends but needs to work with to ensure it gets the oil and gas it needs. It’s a sad world we live in.

Wind and solar, on the other hand, can be “home-grown”, per the EC’s Ursula von der Leyen. This is their biggest advantage over other sources of energy. The problem are disadvantages, which get meticulously swept under the panels.

That Birol should seek to provide another nudge to the transition by saying it will not be affected by the crisis is nothing unexpected. It is getting a little bit tiresome, however, to hear the same talking points repeated ad nauseam in the apparent attempt to make them facts.

Meanwhile, the European leaders of that same transition are reopening coal plants, extending the lives of nuclear plants, and saying the resulting increase in emissions will only last for a little while, just until we get through this winter.

Next year things will miraculously resolve themselves and we’ll miraculously find all the raw materials we need to build all the gigawatts of wind and solar we need to become totally independent of bad actors like the Russians even as we gobble up all the metals Russia manages to send our way. But we’re not talking about it, so it’s all good.

This is how Birol’s piece ends:

So don’t believe all the negative narratives about the energy crisis. Yes, there are some tough challenges ahead, especially this winter. But that doesn’t mean Russia is winning or that efforts to tackle climate change are doomed. And after winter comes spring. The oil shocks of the 1970s resulted in major progress in energy efficiency, nuclear power, solar and wind. Today’s crisis can have a similar impact and help speed up the shift to a cleaner and more secure energy future.

Now that you’ve wiped your tears of joy and optimism for the future, let’s translate, shall we?

We underestimated Russia just as badly as we overestimated ourselves so now we’re doing urgent damage control before temperatures fall to zero in a couple of months. Some of us might not survive the winter but we hope most will (politicians, that is, not regular people) because the mission of transition must continue. We’ll talk about raw material shortages and energy costs some other time because I’ve really got to rush right now, I’ve got another upbeat op-ed to write.