Editor’s note: This commentary is by David Blittersdorf, the president and CEO of AllEarth Renewables.
We are in the beginning of the largest crisis our world has seen in almost a century. Covid-19 has rapidly triggered a human health and economic disaster in our fragile modern society, the likes of which we have never experienced before.
Crises are chaotic and disruptive, but in every crisis there is opportunity for positive systemic change. Leading up the worldwide pandemic, we already knew that our way of life was based on unsustainable habits: our reliance upon burning fossil fuels and our attachment to resource-depleting consumerism was destroying our planetary home. We knew we needed to change to renewable energy and drastically reduce carbon emissions. We have made little real progress on this in the 50 years since the first Earth Day in 1970. We may have failed in the past, but in the wake of our newfound global collective awareness of what is essential, we have a new opportunity right now to carry out the big changes necessary.
Today, worldwide use of oil (the #1 fossil fuel in usage) has plummeted 30%, due to 90% less air travel, less driving and more people working from home. The crash in oil pricing to as low as minus $37 per barrel is the wakeup call to the fossil fuel industry — you are going out of business. No demand and too much production is going to bankrupt the shale-fracking part of the oil business. Shale oil was a 15-year one-shot production spurt that moved the worldwide oil peak from 2005 to 2020. It was based on high oil prices — shale and tar sands oil is no longer profitable at prices less than $40 per barrel. We are now at peak oil production and are headed down, down, down. As production plummets for economic reasons beyond the oil industry’s control, how shall we prepare as a society for the end of cheap oil?
Let’s use this crisis to pivot to increase in-state wind and solar installations. Vermont utilities, regulators and the governor have in recent years worked successfully to stop in-state wind energy and slow down solar installations. It’s time to write new laws and invest in new infrastructure to support renewables, combat climate change, switch to electric heating, new transportation systems, local food production, local schools and re-localizing our lifestyles. It’s time to invest in the new future and not to waste money propping up the old ways. We must stop sending our money out of state to support corporations that are killing the planet by not valuing the essential resources it provides for human life.
Phoenixes rise from ashes. Instead of bailing out and trying to save the old ways of doing things, let’s think and act boldly to create and build a “new normal,” and not go back to the failed normal we were in. The world is changing, but Vermont has the potential to be a bright new model of how humanity can live within our means, in alignment with our global habitat.
