Category Archives: Ukraine

My car runs on sunshine, which doesn’t need to pass through the Strait of Hormuz

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Donald Trump is known as a supporter of fossil fuels and an enemy of renewable energy. His administration has been creating roadblocks for wind power while encouraging increased production and use of oil, gas and coal. However, his war of choice against Iran has (very predictably) lead to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which normally about a fifth of the world’s oil and gas will pass (along with aluminium, nitrogen fertilizer, helium and other supplies needed by economies around the world).

The closure of this crucial naval passage has globally driven up prices of fossil fuels, despite vast amounts of oil being released from strategic reserves by governments in many countries. Because these strategic reserves are limited in capacity, the current response is not sustainable. If the blockade doesn’t end soon, prices will inevitably go much higher. Sustained crude prices of US$ 150-200 a barrel would probably trigger a global recession. Countries including Japan and Germany have used temporary subsidies to bring gasoline prices down again, but these measures are costly to government budgets and inevitably end up driving up profits of oil companies, which are still in control of pump prices.

Fortunately, the extra cost from higher gasoline prices to me has been zero. I bought my last liter of gasoline some time in early December, before I took delivery of a Hyundai Ioniq 5, a car that I love to drive. Now I just plug it into the wall socket in my garage some time while I am not driving it. This can be at night when I’m asleep but most of the electricity for charging has actually come at daytime from the solar panels on the roof of my house. The effective cost for me is 15 JPY (9.6 US cents) per kWH, which is what the grid operator would pay me if I were to feed the surplus into the grid instead of consuming it myself. Over the past 2200 km the car has averaged a power consumption of 15.2 kWh per 100 km, which is the equivalent of 228 JPY (US$1.46) per 100 km. With current gasoline subsidies in place, that amount of money would buy me about 1.5 liters of gasoline here in Japan. Not even a Honda Supercub motor scooter could go 100 km on that amount of fuel, let alone a car that comfortably seats 5 adults. And note that I am not actually paying that money: I just don’t get paid that amount from the power company if I charge the car instead of selling power to them.

A lot of people who would not ordinarily be considering EVs, either because they don’t think that much about the climate disaster or because of various concerns they have still had about the practicality of EVs, are now re-evaluating the situation and taking a serious look at available EVs, either new models on the market or cheaper second hand cars available without wait.

With skyrocketing LNG prices, countries that have invested in onshore and offshore wind and solar are somewhat insulated from these economic shocks as they consume less of the expensive imported fuels. Solar and wind are now the cheapest source of new generating capacity almost anywhere on the planet. This was true even before the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, but the price shocks are lending an urgency to plans for a shift away from fossil fuels that wasn’t felt by many before. Also, the falling cost of batteries has allowed renewable energy to displace more and more fossil power as output can be time-shifted via batteries, with a combination of solar plus batteries still beating fossil gas on cost. Battery farms can soak up cheap surplus power at midday and sell it at a profit in the evening, when demand is high.

“Sunlight has to travel 93 million miles to reach the Earth, but none of those miles go through the Strait of Hormuz.” (Bill McKibben)

In the discussion about the energy transition, those who wanted to slow it down or delay it have often emphasized the supposed unreliability of renewable sources such as wind and solar, compared to dispatchable output from coal and gas power plants. Germans have even coined the unique word “Dunkelflaute” for a period when it’s dark and there is not much wind. However, many countries depend on imports for much of their fossil fuels and that makes them highly dependent on events outside their control. If it wasn’t already clear after the Ukraine war, the war between Israel, the US and Iran has now made it abundantly clear that fossil fuels are not the safe, dependable option: Renewable energies are.

From 2011 to 2022, Germany depended on the Nord Stream 1 pipeline for supposedly cheap and secure Russian gas. Then on August 31, 2022, six months after Putin started a full scale war against Ukraine, a European country, he halted all gas supplies via the pipeline. On July 25, 2022 Russia had already throttled supplies via Nord Stream down to 20 % of capacity. At the time Germany’s largest gas storage site, the Rehden storage facility, was actually operated by Gazprom, the Russian gas conglomerate. It turned out that before the winter of 2021/2022 it had not refilled the storage site as usual, instead letting it drop to a mere 0.5 % of capacity by April and thus directly exposing Germany to Russian blackmail when Russia launched the invasion of Ukraine on February 24. Several weeks after the complete shutdown of Nord Stream 1, three of the four 1200 km pipes at the bottom of the Baltic sea were destroyed by an explosion.

The German government took over the Rehden storage facility but had to work hard to quickly secure alternative supplies of gas, relying heavily on LNG from Qatar. All shipments from Qatar to Europe have to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. In March 2026, Iranian missiles knocked out 2 of the 14 gas-to-liquid trains needed for filling LNG tankers. Even if the Strait of Hormuz were to reopen quickly, according to industry experts it could take as long as 3-5 years for the damage to be repaired to return to the previous export rate.

For many countries, use of fossil fuels sends wealth abroad. Germany spends 80 billion euros per year on fossil fuel imports, money which could be spent on setting up wind turbines, solar panels and batteries in Germany, thus creating local jobs rather than funding unsavory regimes abroad. More than half of Germany’s electricity is already generated from renewals. More than 20 % of new cars are EVs. These are far lower rates than in Denmark, Sweden or Norway, but much more than in Japan. Only about 2 % of new cars in Japan in 2025 were EVs. Solar and wind provided no more than 12 % of electricity in Japan in 2025. Meanwhile China has been adding more wind and solar power per year than the rest of the world combined.

The fossil fuel crisis triggered by the war with Iran has the potential to dramatically speed up the transition away from costly and unreliable fossil fuels. Even fossil fuel exporters understand this, as shown by the recent decision by the UAE to leave OPEC. It was a landmark step, as the UAE has been the second largest swing producer within OPEC after the Saudis. This step will allow them to increase their production rate without adhering to agreed ceilings, to maximize export revenue in the short term before global demand for oil ultimately collapses. If demand for oil was steady, it would make more sense for UAE and OPEC to artificially restrict supply to maintain high prices to rake in profits. This is no longer a viable option, as renewables are now undercutting fossils, putting an expiry date on the fossil fuel industry as a whole.

Reiwa Shinsengumi and the Environment

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Three years ago I wrote about how Reiwa Shinsengumi, often described as a “left-wing populist” party, and its leader Yamamoto Tarō refused to condemn Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, instead spreading Russian propaganda narratives that perversely blamed the war on NATO, which Ukraine was not even member of.

Left wing parties tend to be more pro-environmental than conservative or right wing parties that tend to be less motivated to take aggressive action to minimize climate change. How does Reiwa Shinsengumi rank in this regard? Well, it’s not exactly a Japanese Green Party, let’s put it like that!

Yes, Reiwa Shinsengumi is strongly anti-nuclear, opposing a restart of nuclear power stations idled after the 2011 tsunami and nuclear meltdown. Instead it wants to phase out all restarted nuclear power stations. That by itself is no pro-environmental position: While it may minimize risks of future nuclear disasters, it does nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, if anything it makes it more challenging. While nuclear accidents may be a possibility, the climate disaster is a certainty if we continue on the present course.

In a 2022 questionnaire for the House of Councillors (Upper House) elections the party responds to a question:

Q: Will you reduce domestic coal power to zero by 2030?
A: [Yes]
[Supplementary Explanation:] In order to achieve “100% renewable energy,” we will utilize high-efficiency natural gas-fired thermal power as an interim energy source. We will not restart nuclear power plants. In earthquake-prone Japan, we will go for both coal-free and nuclear power-free. We will utilize abundant natural energy sources.

Note how they answer this with a direct promotion of LNG, much of which Japan has been importing from Sakhalin in Russia. The answer does not specifically mention wind and solar, the two “abundant natural energy sources” that Japan has been badly neglecting. The actual environmental benefits of LNG over coal are quite questionable. A 2024 Cornell University study found the climate footprint of LNG 33% worse than that of coal, once liquefaction and shipping are taken into account:

Over 20 years, the carbon footprint for LNG is one-third larger than coal, when analyzed using the measurement of global warming potential, which compares the atmospheric impact for different greenhouse gases. Even on a 100-year time scale – a more-forgiving scale than 20 years – the liquefied natural gas carbon footprint equals or still exceeds coal, Howarth said.
(“Liquefied natural gas carbon footprint is worse than coal“, 2024-10-03)

This commitment to phasing out coal by a specific year is already progress however from the 2019 stance of the party. Philip Brasor wrote about Yamamoto Tarō in Japan Times:

In fact, he has advocated for coal as the transition energy source toward renewables in Japan, a position that dismays environmentalists.
(“Taro Yamamoto blurs the popular line on climate change”, Japan Times, 2019-11-30)

I am highly skeptical of Reiwa Shinsengumi’s commitment to the environment. Yes, it is against nuclear power, but without a robust policy for switching electricity generation to wind, solar and geothermal, phasing out existing nuclear power stations will only make it more difficult to decarbonize power generation and could even promote fossil-fuel burning thermal power stations. As far as I can tell, the party has no detailed plan for promoting green power. It seems like an afterthought next to its more sexy anti-nuclear policies that promise to catch votes for it.

Advocating for a big push for onshore and offshore wind and a massive expansion of long distance transmission lines needed to bring power from windy coasts in Hokkaido, the Northeast and the Japan sea coast to the urban centers in the Kanto and Kansai is essential but nowhere near as effective at adding seats in parliament because you would have to do a lot of leg work explaining the policy. Populists don’t want to do that because they are more interested in gaining influence than in putting in place policies that actually benefit people.

Reiwa Shinsengumi’s policies are selected by its unchallenged leader. In that it resembles the German BSW (Sarah Wagenknecht Alliance), another supposed left wing party that is spreading narratives of Vladimir Putin’s fascist government. BSW is not run by its members but exclusively according to the whims of its leader. Unsurprisingly, BSW also sees Germany’s economic salvation in the resumption of supplies of Russian gas and not in an accelerated switch to wind and solar.

Both parties claim to champion low income members of the population and social policies, but in reality they are pied pipers with sympathies for Putin that must not be trusted.

Putinism, the anti-imperialism of fools

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German socialist Agust Bebel is supposed to have called antisemitism the “socialism of fools” (“der Sozialismus des dummen Kerls”). By that he meant people who recognize capitalist exploitation only if the exploiter happened to be Jewish but who would otherwise turn a blind eye to the economic realities. The German Nazi party did call itself “national socialist” but the only businesses it expropriated were those of Jewish owners while other big industrialists benefited from government contracts for rearmament and from cheap slave labour during World War II.

A similar phenomenon is at play in the response to Russia’s unprovoked war against Ukraine. Russia is receiving support from people around the world, both on the far left and the far right. These Putin apologists spread Russian talking points and other propaganda. They often paint Ukraine as a mere pawn of an imperialist West dominated by the USA, which according to them is using the war to marginalize Russia and push it aside in the post-cold war order. These people will accuse the US of past crimes and other immoral actions in Iraq, Serbia, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan and elsewhere while ignoring torture, rape and killing perpetrated right now by Russia. According to them, your right to criticise Russian crimes in Ukraine depends on you first joining their condemnations of past actions of the west.

Let’s be real: These apologists of the Russian war of aggression are not anti-imperialists, far from it: These people are not guided by a moral compass or by concern for the victims of imperialism but by suspicion and hatred of specific countries. They are merely anti-western. Russia is an imperialist power of its own that over several centuries grew from the small Muscovite principality to the largest country in the world by intimidation and military conquest and even genocide. From the Holodomor genocidal famine in Ukraine in the 1930s to the deportation of Crimean tatars to deportations of Poles and Balts in the 1940, it has used utmost brutality. To this day, Russia treats its neighbours not as a sovereign countries but as the “near abroad”, a sphere of influence in which governments can make independent decisions only at their own peril. Should their choices run counter to Moscow’s wishes, anything can happen!

Any “anti-imperialism” that is blind to Russian or Chinese acts of imperialism is anti-imperialism in name only. It must therefore be called anti-imperialism of the fools. Anyone who can condemn acts of imperialism only if they are committed by western countries but not if the perpetrator happens to be Russia or China is not really anti-imperialist but merely anti-western. Claiming the mantle of “anti-imperialism” for supporters of a post-fascist aggressor such as Vladimir Putin’s Russia is laughable.

Ukraine is a sovereign democratic country. On multiple occasions Russia committed to respecting its existing borders from the 1991 breakup of the USSR, which include Crimea and the Donbas. By first threatening and then invading Ukraine, Russia has violated the UN Charta, the Budapest memorandum and other obligations under international law. Wars of aggression are a war crime, separate from any crimes against humanity committed in their course. The Russian government should remember that leading Nazis and Japanese militarists were charged, convicted and executed after the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials for preparing a war of aggression.

Past US governments have made many bad and sometimes criminal choices, such as supporting anti-democratic coups in Iran, Guatemala and Chile, the bombing of Cambodia or the invasion of Iraq under flimsy and made-up evidence. However, no country gets a free ticket entitling it to commit war crimes every time some other country violates international law. That’s not how it works in domestic criminal law and that’s not how it works in international law either. Ukraine needs our solidarity to defend its borders and citizens against an imperialist aggressor.

I am thankful the US is stepping up to help Ukraine as much as they have, regardless of their own checkered past.

Lend-Lease for Ukraine

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The US has revived its historic Lend-Lease policy to help Ukraine. This was a World War II era policy in support of the enemies of Nazi Germany.

When the UK and France declared war on Nazi Germany after its invasion of Poland, the US initially remained neutral. After the fall of France, Britain remained the only major power resisting Germany. This changed only when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. From 1939 to 1941, the Soviet Union had been an ally of Nazi Germany under the Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty and had supplied Germany with oil for its invasion of Denmark, Norway, France and Benelux.

After the fall of Dunkirk, Britain had been almost on its own (it was still supported by Australia, Canada, New Zealand and British colonies). It could buy supplies from the US but it had to pay in cash (i.e. silver) and transport the goods to Britain on its own ships. With the passage of Lend-Lease in March 1941, the US could supply arms, ammunition and other goods to Britain without requiring payment and it sent them to Britain on American ships.

After the German attack on the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa), the USSR was also supplied by the US with tanks, trucks, ammunition, food and many other materials for the war effort. These supplies were sent via Persia, Murmansk and the Far East. When Putins’s Russia today talks about the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, it consistently remains silent about the US contribution to the Soviet war effort, without which the country may have collapsed.

Lend-Lease was controversial in the US. Isolationists and nazi sympathisers argued it would put the US on a slippery slope towards entering the war in Europe. However, the US still officially remained neutral and not at war with Germany and its allies. This only changed in December 1941 when Imperial Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. A few days after Pearl Harbor, Hitler declared war on the US in support of its ally in the Far East. Thus it was not Lend-Lease that got the US involved in World War II but the Japanese attack.

This holds a message for today. Countries do not automatically become parties in war if they support another country with supplies.

Wars of aggression are a violation of the UN Charter which guarantees the territorial integrity of all states and requires them to use peaceful means to settle any disputes. Every country has a right of self-defense. Under International law, countries worldwide have every right to support countries exercising their right of self-defence against aggressors and invaders. That is as true in 2022 as it was in 1939 or 1941.

Reiwa Shinsengumi and Putin

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On February 28, 2022 the Japanese left-wing populist opposition party Reiwa Shinsengumi led by actor turned politician Yamamoto Taro refused to support a resolution by the Japanese Diet to condemn the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine.

LDP politician Kono Taro wrote on twitter the next day:

Parliamentary Resolution to denounce the invasion of Ukraine by Russia was passed in the House of Representatives. Surprisingly, the three Reiwa Shinsengumi members voted against the Resolution.

I was curious why they would refuse to join an anti-war resolution and checked their party website.

What I found there was a statement that repeated a Putin talking point, blaming the war on NATO expansion into eastern Europe that supposedly violated a promise made to the Soviet Union not to admit now members from the former Soviet bloc:

今回の惨事を生み出したのはロシアの暴走、という一点張りではなく、
米欧主要国がソ連邦崩壊時の約束であるNATO東方拡大せず、を反故にしてきたことなどに目を向け、この戦争を終わらせるための真摯な外交的努力を行う
(“We don’t want to make the blanket statement that it was Russia’s outburst that created the current catastrophe.
Make a sincere diplomatic effort to end this war, focusing on the fact that the U.S. and major European countries have reneged on their promises made at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union not to expand NATO eastward.”)
(【声明】ロシアによるウクライナ侵略を非難する決議について（れいわ新選組 2022年2月28日）, 2022-02-18)

This Putin talking point that has been repeated by Russian propagandists over and over seeks to repaint the violent assault on a neighbour country as an act of self-defense. It is revisionist history and has been widely discredited as a myth. No such promise was ever made and Russia has not provided any evidence for its claim.

According to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, there was no such agreement. What did happen was that during the negotiations leading up to the reunification of Germany western powers agreed not to deploy NATO troops other than troops from Germany itself into parts of the former GDR (East Germany) once Germany was unified. NATO countries have kept this promise to this present day.

Admission of new NATO members was a subject not even talked about back in 1990. As sovereign nations, it is the right of former Warsaw pact states to apply for NATO membership just as it is the right of NATO members to accept or reject their applications to this mutual defense treaty. After the annexation of Crimea and support for a separatist war in eastern Ukraine by Russia it is now quite clear why eastern European countries have been seeking safety in numbers by wanting to join NATO.

Putin justifying his invasion of Ukraine by its desire to join NATO to keep him off is like a guy justifying the rape of a woman by her calling the police last time he beat her.

Frankly, I don’t expect anything better of Vladimir Putin who is more akin to a mobster than to a regular politician but I am disappointed by Reiwa Shinsengumi whom somehow I had expected to be on the side of democracy and human rights and not of a right-wing dictator.