A: Decarbonization
Let me start with an important caveat. I have serious reservations about the wisdom of this war of choice. I wish it had never started, and I’m not going to try to adjudicate the geopolitics or the conduct of the conflict here. Others are doing that in real time, and they’re more qualified than I am on those dimensions.
Instead, I want to look at the war through a lens we return to again and again at The Instigator: the wisdom of decarbonization.
For years now in this newsletter, we’ve argued that it’s a mistake to see climate action as a kind of expensive moral luxury whose only justification is the climate emergency—though if avoiding climate catastrophe were the only reason to decarbonize, that would already be more than enough.
The past few weeks of chaos in energy markets and shipping lanes have once again underscored a simpler, harder‑to‑ignore point: fossil‑fuel dependence is strategically dumb.