Lewis Pinault is a partner at Airbus Ventures, where he invests and serves as a board director for space technology-related startups across the globe. A NASA-trained meteoriticist, a researcher at University College London/Birkbeck’s Centre for Planetary Sciences, presently collaborating with JAXA’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Sciences. Pinault contributed this article to Space.com‘s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.
Humanity’s fossil fuel war — a war waged with insane relentlessness on both ourselves and our planet — has never raged more brightly or with such power of irreversible destruction.
Whatever the purported causes, we are presently witnessing savagery that seems designed to serve only one dark rationale: incurring such pain that a concession of Ukraine’s eastern Dnieper-Donetsk region, holding upwards of 90% of the country’s vast oil, gas and coal reserves, becomes as seemingly acceptable as the loss of Crimea and its significant offshore gas reserves five years earlier.
This time, the fossil fuel war has rapidly cascaded global dimensions. As the flow of hydrocarbons is stymied in some quarters, it is unleashed in unprecedented quantities in others; the price of oil escalates, allowing still-saleable Russian oil to pay and fuel yet more armor and destruction. Presumed allies amongst the fossil fuel kingdoms are revealed for the cynical oil-worshippers. The world’s autocrats, who can never really more than uncomplicated base emotions, are grateful for the cruel simplicities of avoiding complex change and sacrifice at any cost.
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Moving heavy industry off Earth could help cure some of our planet’s ails. Some experts say that moving heavy industrial activities off Earth could help solve some of our planet’s problems.
Humanity’s fossil fuel war — a war waged with insane relentlessness on both ourselves and our planet — has never raged more brightly or with such power of irreversible destruction.
Whatever the purported causes, we are presently witnessing savagery that seems designed to serve only one dark rationale: incurring such pain that a concession of Ukraine’s eastern Dnieper-Donetsk region, holding upwards of 90% of the country’s vast oil, gas and coal reserves, becomes as seemingly acceptable as the loss of Crimea and its significant offshore gas reserves five years earlier.
Lewis Pinault, partner at Airbus Ventures.
This time, the fossil fuel war has rapidly cascaded global dimensions. As the flow of hydrocarbons is stymied in some quarters, it is unleashed in unprecedented quantities in others; the price of oil escalates, allowing still-saleable Russian oil to pay and fuel yet more armor and destruction. Presumed allies amongst the fossil fuel kingdoms are revealed for the cynical oil-worshippers. The world’s autocrats, who can never really more than uncomplicated base emotions, are grateful for the cruel simplicities of avoiding complex change and sacrifice at any cost.
Even as the final Working Group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concludes that the elimination of fossil fuels is the only practical and timely path to avoiding irreversible climate damage and all its attendant crises of disease, starvation, and forced migration — orders of magnitude larger than present-day Ukraine’s — humanity continues to inject fossil fuels into the system.
In the meantime, unchecked consumerism drives mining more places for more metals for more phones, and more cars; large-scale agriculture and forestry operations — with little relation to sustainable nutrition or housing needs — encroach on wild habitats essential to our biosphere, further driving disease and more deadly mass migrations of thousands of species; freshwater supplies are imperiled, and we are amidst one of the biosphere’s most significant extinctions — an event that’s likely to consume us before we can even fully catalog it.
