Europe’s Deadly Ethical Dilemma: Energy or Ethics?

A political cartoon depicting Putin's relentless desire to crush democracy by any means, including using Russia's extensive oil profits to do so. Via https://usrussiaukraineconflict.weebly.com

By Martin Cohen

Energy or ethics? On the morning of February 24, 2022, Russian forces invaded Ukraine after months of rising tensions and failing diplomatic talks between Russia and Ukraine. In the days that followed, Russia attacked from the air, land, and sea — killing thousands of people, mostly civilians, and devastating the lives of more than 44 million people.

Outside Russia and a handful of satellite countries, most people think that's plain wrong. But here’s the more tricky ethical dilemma: European countries pay about $850 million per day - repeat, per day! - for Russian oil and natural gas. Since February, this money has financed Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Teresa Ribera, Spain’s minister for Ecological Transition, was reported earlier this month saying that

‘It is very difficult to explain to European public opinion and Ukrainian society that we are still importing Russian energy that finances this war,’ and that such energy imports create ‘obvious moral tension’.

Indeed it does. And to reduce the ‘moral tension’, political leaders and an uncritical Western media have insisted that cutting the energy imports would be difficult, and would dramatically put up prices for consumers.

Take gas. The universal mantra about Europe needing Russian gas is misleading. Europe (like the US) has plenty of its own gas IF it stops burning it – to make electricity. Burning gas to make electricity is in any case a wasteful and short-term practice. 

Another argument offered for continuing to buy Russian energy is that Russia is a major supplier of diesel fuel and that if that supply were lost, operating diesel-powered trucks and farm equipment would become much more expensive. Journalists happily repeat such things. Yet typically, in Europe, the price of diesel is more than half made up of tax. 

Put another way, the choice is between continuing to fund atrocities like that in Bucha last week, in which the world saw "lifeless bodies, bloodied by bullets, and some with hands bound, had been left strewn about or shoveled into makeshift mass graves"  and a temporary interruption of government tax receipts. 

Diesel is only a small part of European energy from Russia though. The bigger questions are about coal, oil and above all gas.

Take coal. Today there is a a whopping carbon tax on coal: 42.33 Euro/t-CO₂ leading EU countries to drastically cut down their production and (to a lesser extent) their consumption of coal over the past two decades to meet climate change targets. However, rather hypocritically their reliance on imported coal, especially from Russia, has shot up. (The explanatory factor here is that European coal industries used to be unionised and expensive. Climate Change policy enabled governments to outmaneuver the powerful unions.) 

Nonetheless, the point is that today, as Alexander Bethe, chairman  of the German association of coal importers, has said, hard coal imports from Russia to Germany can easily be substituted. In a matter of months at most. Bethe named the US, Colombia, South Africa and Australia among the countries most likely to fill the gap.

‘There is a well-functioning world market. There are sufficient quantities available. Germany imported about 18 million tons of hard coal from Russia last year. That is only about 2% of the total world trade.’

Ethics is linked to what is possible. Cutting the flow of money to the Russians is seen in current circumstances as deeply troubling - and thus we are assured repeatedly that alternatives do not exist. Yet in fact they do. 

But what about Russian gas? As far as generating electricity goes, Europe has an internal market into which renewables, nuclear and coal could all - immediately - replace gas. The failure to do this is again a political decision.

Politicians seeking advice on what is possible in the energy sphere are being bamboozled by two powerful lobbies who are now blocking what on the face of it is the moral imperative to stop buying Russian energy. One lobby is the nuclear industry who have explicitly linked the ‘inability’ to stop buying Russian energy to their programme of new nuclear power stations: a message that the UK, for example, has eagerly adopted.

But the other lobby, particularly important in leading the otherwise liberal media away from campaigning to stop the energy imports from Russia… is the green one. It is the climate change lobby that insists that even now, power stations must run on imported Russian gas rather than European or American coal. The strength of the green lobby is so great that in the UK for example, the coal units of the country's largest power station, Drax, are idling now just when they could be operating and reducing the need for Russian gas. That said, during Boris Johnson's surprise visit with President Zelensky in Kyiv on April 9, the United Kingdom set an example for EU leaders of what can in fact be accomplished in sympathy with Ukraine, with the prime minister declaring an embargo on Russian energy.

More generally though in  Europe, the ‘virtuous’ carbon taxes have led electricity companies to burn (Russian) gas and coal rather than their own (as well as, of course, to use expensive renewable energies). 

The result is a strange kind of alliance that sociologists call a Baptist and Bootlegger coalition. The term describes the shared interests of the baptists who believe alcohol is evil, and the bootleggers who want scarcity to lead to higher profits. Bizarrely, at the moment, people who are convinced that they have to stop the world overheating have - whatever their intentions! - ended up on same side as a Russian army conducting a horrific ‘special operation’ on its neighbour. It’s a bitter irony indeed.

The Art of War? Obama's Machiavellian Foreign Policy

“The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.” 

- Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (1513)

Is Obama a foreign policy genius - a modern day Machiavelli - or an inept ingénue? 

Consider some recent and some ongoing cases.

1. During the US presidential election campaign, Barack Obama mocked his opponent, Mitt Romney for saying that Russia was a threat  - opting instead to forgive Russia past transgressions, press the restart button and have 'business as usual' relations. China, he asserted, was the real threat, even as Chinese money kept the US economy afloat.

Yet, as has widely been pointed out, the Russian military interventions in Ukraine, which have led to the annexation of the Crimean peninsula and to the entrenchment of separatist enclaves in Donetsk and Luhansk provinces, directly challenge the post-Cold War consensus. Eastern Ukraine follows on other more tentative land-grabs, and in turn will be followed by greater prizes - Estonia, Lithuania… And if incursions there show the NATO lion cannot roar, why not further?

2. In Syria, faced with a choice between supporting the moderate rebels, and leaving the extremists to take over, he opted for the latter policy - with the result that the Assad government recovered lost ground and ISIS became a regional force. Originally, U.S. intelligence saw the terror group as a U.S. strategic asset. Now though, as David Kilcullen, the US military strategist said to have saved Iraq through the 'surge' has put it:

'Western countries have a clear interest in destroying ISIS, but counter-insurgency should not even be under discussion. This is a straight-up conventional fight against a state-like entity, and the goal should be to utterly annihilate ISIS as a state.' 

Just unfortunate then that ISIS has now become a force that would require a greater military effort than that of the original Iraq war. Your move, Professor!

3. But it is in Ukraine that his judgements seem most dangerous. Obama has apparently decided that there is no strategic significance to allowing Russia to annex parts of the former Soviet Union. Of course, the morality of this do not concern him - a man who says in one of his books that he learned his his ethics from the backs of cereal packets. In pursuit of this policy there have been so substantial sanctions, although there is a possibility that the US was involved in the Saudi policy of lowering the world price of oil - which has hurt the Russians. Under Obama there has been no access to arms and training, leaving the hopelessly amateurish and poorly equipped Ukrainian conscripts to be slaughtered in their thousands by the separatists backed by Russian special forces and the very best equipment that the Russians have.

4. In Egypt, Obama sided with the Egyptian military against the democracy movement, in due course helping to usher in a new and if anything even more vicious regime than that run by the US's client Hosni Mubarak.

5. As for the Palestine-Israel conflict, Obama has managed to present the US as both powerless and inept - threatening responses and laying down red lines which he never has any intention of following through on. The Israeli Prime Minster is encouraged to treat him with contempt.

6. And then, earlier this month, his international trade agenda was left in tatters after even the Democratic minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, voted against his plans to for a new bill, going directly against Obama less than three hours after the president begged his party’s caucus to support it.

7. Not to foget the War in Europe, entirely! The economic policies one between Greece and the Eurozone, that is.  Here, Obama weighed in on the side of Greece, ordering the rest of Europe to forgive its trangressions and, well, bend the Eurozone rules a little. Such advice might have been deeeply probematic for the Eurozone if followed - it certainly helped reduce the liklihood of the Greek's seeking a compromise. Result - this week - boom!

The fact is, Obama sees himself as a true Machiavellian Prince, one who presents one face to the world while acting in a quite different way in secret. He sees himself as enhancing US geopolitical and structural power; strengthening the American identity (hence the oft-repeated determination to stop the torture programme and release the extra-judicial prisoners such as those held at Guantanamo,  policies he has no intention of genuinely carrying out) and the search for domestic political consolidation.

According to former US national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski:

'He’s not a softy. But he’s a person who tries to think through these events so you can draw some long-term conclusions.'

The longterm consequence of policy in the Middle East seems likely to be polarisation - between a US-backed series of kleptocracies and ultra-Islamists. In Europe, it is likely to be a 'hot war' between the Western Europeans and the Russians. In general, Obama seems to be sowing the seeds of global chaos - but a chaos in which perhaps for some it can be imagined that Continental United States will be immune. If that is indeed his aim, it is certainly a piece of cynicism worthy of the Italian master himself.


Further, or is it backwards? reading here

Primary colours

23 July 2009

Philosophers and Truthiness

By Matthew Blakeway

The comedian and political commentator Stephen Colbert coined the term truthiness* . This is a way of mocking politicians who claim to know something intuitively but fail to put forward any evidence to support their assertion. Too often in political rhetoric, truthiness presents as fact what is merely an ideological belief – not a real truth, but a truth that we want to exist. As Colbert put it ‘Anyone can read the news to you. I promise to feel the news at you.’

Over the last few weeks, academic economists have started the share the fun. The equivalent term that Paul Romer coined to mock his less-than-rigorous colleagues is mathiness. This, he says, is an argument that looks like robust mathematics and sounds like robust mathematics, but actually isn’t. Sloppy economists create arguments that use terms that are mathematically defined elsewhere but which have subtly different meanings in the argument presented. In this way, an ideological position (e.g. if welfare is cut, the unemployed will all find jobs) can be presented as a solid economic argument. As Romer says: 

‘Academic politics, like any other type of politics, is better served by words that are evocative and ambiguous, but if an argument is transparently political, economists interested in science will simply ignore it.’ 

Mathematical theories, like those created by academic economists, should only be trusted when each term is precisely defined and consistently used. Only then can the conclusions of such arguments be empirically demonstrated to be either true or false. The example that he gives is growth theory, where competing versions all appear to be clearly stated, yet show no converging consensus.

And now that creating words to mock woolly thinking is in danger of becoming an epidemic. It occurs to me that the humanities need one of their own. Or, as Stephen Colbert might say, ‘truthiness’ and ‘mathiness’ just don’t feel right in our context. So I propose that we adopt the word ‘explaininess’ because I think this is a problem that is pervasive throughout writing in philosophy and human sciences. Explaininess is an intellectual Ponzi scheme where one nebulous notion is needed to explain another nebulous notion, but the cumulative whole is presented as an explanation.



For example, in connection with a current project of mine, I recently spent a two miserable weeks reading all the recent academic theories explaining various forms of mental illness. In one paper summarising four theories of borderline personality disorder, I was left struggling to succinctly state the difference between Theory B and Theory C. These used terms like ‘maternal imprinting’, ‘suppressed memory’, ‘learned anxiety’ and ‘secondary emotion’. At least an example was given for the last one: anger turns to shame. But I was left asking: is that normal? I certainly don’t think it happens that way with me, so if we are to talk about how that happens at all, we at least need a box and arrow diagram with meaningful things in the boxes and understandable causal relationships. Otherwise, the existence of secondary emotions is questionable and their causality is entirely unknown. Yet in the world of explaininess, this is a theory of a mental illness where competing theories don’t converge towards consensus because none of them are empirically verifiable.

In philosophy, explaininess is rampant. A particularly egregious example is Jacques Derrida’s theory of deconstruction, based around two terms that Derrida coined differance and presance. These are two perfectly reasonable words intentionally misspelt by just one letter. Geddit? But he tells us that these terms can’t be defined; so how am I supposed to know that my understanding of them is the same as his? After a period of hair-tearing frustration, I was reassured to discover that Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault had both stated that they didn’t understand it either. In this case, if you admit you don’t understand it, then you are in more elite company than if you pretend that you do.

Derrida is famous for his obscurity, but explaininess exists everywhere in philosophy. There are hundreds of books on ‘freewill’, for another example, but few of them offer a robust hypothesis as to what it is. If you are writing a book claiming that this concept is useful, then the burden falls on you to explain to your readers what it is. Too often, writers just presume that I understand the term, but actually I don’t. If freewill is a piece of brain hardware, then that is alright because eventually a neuroscientist will find it in the hypothalamus or somewhere. And if it is a piece of mental software, then eventually some mathy person will build a model of it so that we can all understand how it works; so that is all good as well. But if it is a part of your aura or something that is beamed to you through the aether, then I suggest that some academic philosophers should be seeking alternative employment. Oh, the joys of tenure!

The problem is that if we ban explaininess in philosophy, then there isn’t much left for us to talk about. But I think this points to the real objective of philosophy. Too often, people say that philosophy’s role is to ask questions, but it ends up with us talking ad infinitum about all the questions that can’t be answered – the things that scientists can’t be bothered with. If, on the other hand, philosophy’s objective is to answer questions, then we would all have given up in the 3rd century BC, by which time it was already clear that almost no progress would be made in concrete terms. My suggestions is that the objective of philosophy should be to take unanswerable questions and try to change them into ones that can be addressed in a scientific fashion. For example, if nobody can tell us what freewill actually is, then maybe we should change the question into ‘what is the cause of a human action?’ Already that is starting to sound like a scientific question, rather than a philosophical one. I'd say, pull off that trick, and true progress will have been made.



* More on 'Truthiness'  and on 'Mathiness' - as a PDF*