What would you do if the lights went out, like in Spain and Portugal – if everything closed down? Go for a walk? Go native, and head for the hills, with an air rifle and a Bear Grylls book? Sit at a piano until you’d taught yourself the chord pattern for Werewolves of London?
The day of darkness on the Iberian Peninsula reinforced one thing: we are all wholly, completely and embarrassingly in thrall to technology and, because of that, to the power that drives it. For a brief time, the images and stories coming out of Spain and Portugal were like extra scenes from The Last Of Us. The ghost of Cormac McCarthy was circling for source material for a sequel to The Road.
In a curious quirk of timing, a couple of interventions came that dealt with the reality the blackouts brought. Tony Blair decided to stick the boot into a drive towards net zero energy production. In a muddled message he said limiting fossil fuels was doomed to fail. He also said that people in rich countries, by which he means places like the UK, did not want to make financial sacrifices when they knew their impact on global emissions was “minimal”. Within a few hours his organisation, Tony Blair Institute, clarified and said he backed the UK’s net zero target. So that’s all fine then.
There is no evidence that a net zero target, or attempt to grow use of renewables, was a contributing factor to the Spanish collapse. That didn’t stop theories online, and some newspaper columns, suggesting it was involved.
And when somebody like Blair then puts his position as he did, he serves not to show he’s attuned to everyday realities, but adds grist to the mill that makes any attempt to deal with the reality of climate change, and the need to find alternative power sources, a class issue – the hoity-toity middle class pushing their agenda down on the working-class. Then this is bundled into the culture wars, and we’re off at the gallops.
A focus on alternative, UK-created, sustainable energy sources has come in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which increased domestic prices, as every person knows, and illustrated how vulnerable the country is to uncontrollable global vicissitudes.