Nassim Taleb, one of the world’s leading authorities on risk management, has aptly supplemented our modern lexicon with the adjective ‘antifragile’ – the opposite of fragile.
He describes ‘antifragile’ as a state where one adheres to fundamental principles that will provide protection against future uncertainties, while acknowledging that predicting the future is impossible.
Nothing could be more illustrative of the ‘antifragile’ principle than what is transpiring around the globe since Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine. The world now faces rapidly rising energy costs and potential energy shortages too, because past energy policies were predicated on ideology rather than science and principle.
Much of the problem relates to Russia’s supply dominance of gas and oil in world markets, most notably to the European Union and the United Kingdom. The most reliant country is Germany, with Russia being its primary supplier of imported energy for gas (55%), coal (50%) and oil (30%).
These countries are not reliant on Russia because they are not able to supply their own energy, but rather because they have actively withdrawn from using their own reliable energy sources over the past two decades as a result of intense and well-organised pressure from environmental and climate ideologues.
Fracking, the mechanism by which to explore for new gas fields, has been systematically shut down and with nuclear energy being accorded pariah status, governments have shut down highly reliable and efficient nuclear and gas energy plants.
Germany is currently in the process of shutting down its last 3 operational nuclear plants. They also now have some of the most expensive electricity in the world, where user tariffs include green taxes to subsidise expansion of green energy sources. Tariff costs are further exacerbated by the fact that Germany needs to operate a dual power supply system – green energy sources are utilised when they are generating power, but fossil fuel alternatives need to be maintained as a back-up for when the green energy sources are not available.
Contrast this with France, which has maintained energy security as a high national priority (i.e. it is antifragile), where 70% of power is derived from highly reliable and efficient nuclear sources and delivered at some of the lowest tariffs in Europe.
In 2000, the EU produced three times the amount of gas that it produces today. As older gas fields have been depleted, and without the discovery of new fields from fracking exploration, the EU and UK have become more and more dependent on Russian gas imports. Along with the shutting down of nuclear and coal plants in the transition to unreliable green energy, this has left them without energy security, a position that makes them ‘fragile’ and exposed to unwanted Russian influence.
Climate Activism
Zealots and absolutists have always made a dangerous combination and there has been no short supply of these when it comes to climate activism and environmentalism. One only needs to observe the absurd and irrational reasoning proffered in some of these legal cases to fully understand the extent to which they will stretch their arguments.
Climate activist and ex-US vice-president Al Gore’s 2006 documentary, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, declared emphatically that polar bear populations were in serious trouble and would soon become extinct because of the ‘melting’ Arctic ice cap. Yet at the time of production, polar bear populations were doing well, and although this fact was easily known at the time, it was entirely ignored by Gore. Now some 16 years on from ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, not one of Gore’s predictions has come true!
A lack of evidence in the arguments of ideological activists is a long-standing feature, even though there are many voices from highly qualified and rational scientists countering their positions.
Unfortunately, it seems that human nature is way more responsive to apocalyptic prophecies where a guilty perpetrator can be blamed for our supposed misfortunes, thus fulfilling humankind’s seemingly collective but nonetheless narcissistic desire for virtue-signaling.
Rational actors without a doomsday prophecy offer no such gratification.
From Russia with Love
The Russian gas company, Gazprom, is comfortably the world’s largest natural gas company, also possessing the largest gas reserves globally. Gas and oil exports make up a very substantial portion of the Russian economy and are no doubt very important to Russian president Vladimir Putin’s expansionary ambitions in the Ukraine and perhaps elsewhere.
The decline in exploration of gas in the EU and the UK and the shutdown of their nuclear and coal plants have been a huge advantage for Russia and a massive strategic error for much of Europe, but it is only now starting to become apparent to mainstream society as to why this has happened.
Though not previously unknown within political circles, it transpires that Russia has been the financier of many climate activists for many years – read here, here, and here. Russia Today once produced extreme anti-fracking propaganda in declaring that frackers are the moral equivalent of paedophiles.
This is clearly a disturbing moral equivalence, but it also explains amply why climate activists have been so zealous and absolutist in their stance – many of them were very well financed, able to repeatedly counter rational arguments and invoke existential concerns in evangelical style among the general population.
Russia’s obvious economic rationale was to redirect international demand for gas supplies to Gazprom (a state-owned company), but the political result is that many Western countries are now dependent upon energy supplies from a country with which they have few political affiliations or strategic alliances and upon which they are imposing heavy sanctions. Much harm could still be inflicted upon these countries by Russia by way of excessive energy prices or supply shortages, and with Russia under heavy sanctions, this may be a move they will contemplate.
The situation remains one of great uncertainty and high risk to many stakeholders.
There is a maxim that states, ‘When uncertain of the facts, follow the money’. It is now obvious why climate activists and environmentalists heavily undermined fracking exploration around the world, including recent attempts here in South Africa, and are so vehemently opposed to nuclear power.
But equally it also demonstrates that we need to have our eyes wide open when trying to understand the positions taken by environmentalist organisations! The USA is taking this to heart, with a recent proposal from its Senate Judiciary Committee that environmental groups must fully disclose the sources of their funding.
Given South Africa’s precarious position, with our own energy crisis and the critical impact our current energy choices will have on future generations, it is probably worth asking the environmentalists who shut down the Shell fracking proposals last year to open up their books and let us know who is financing them.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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