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A better life can be found by quitting oil.

A better life can be found by quitting oil.

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If a new round sanctions is approved, the EU could ban crude oils imports from Russia in six months. The EU could ban crude oil imports from Russia by 2022, with the exception of a few countries.

The EU currently relies on Russia for 25% of the oil it imports, so the ban is intended to hurt Russian oil producers and weaken Vladimir Putin’s regime economically. The climate could also benefit if some of the fossil fuels and the machinery that power them were replaced with green alternatives. And there’s a lot more to look forward to in a world with less oil sloshing around.


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“Russia produces close to 11,000,000 barrels per day of crude oil,” says Amy Myers Jaffe, a research professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University in the US. “It uses roughly half of this output for its own internal demand, which presumably has increased due to higher military fuel requirements, and it exports five million to six million barrels per day.”

Much of that oil is refined, then pumped into the tanks of engines-cars, lorries and ships. The global transport system – both passenger and freight – is Almost entirely dependentOil at 95 %

Private car drivers could enjoy lower fuel prices if there was no oil demand and cars were either electrified, or made obsolete by cycling and walking initiatives, says Tom Stacey at Anglia Ruskin University, a senior lecturer on operations and supply chain management.

“Driving an EV (electric vehicle) 100 miles will, on average, cost around £4 to £6 (US$5.50 to US$8.00), compared with £13 to £16 in a petrol or diesel car.”

The cost of an EV has been eroded by rising electricity bills and fossil fuel prices in recent years. In autumn 2021, when the average price per kilowatt-hour of electricity was £0.24 (it’s now expected to be £0.28Stacey estimated that an EV battery would cost half the price of a petrol or diesel car to fill up in the UK.

Public charging rates vary, however, and some of the rapid recharging points you find at petrol stations can charge up to £34.50 for a full battery. “The financial benefits of switching to an EV don’t look so strong when electric costs are high,” Stacey says.

But while combustion engine-vehicles are picky about their fuel – often reliant on petrol and diesel refined from crude oil – EV batteries are compatible with electricity generated from any source, including solar panels fitted to your roof.

“These panels will cost money to be installed (although prices are falling every year), but once they are installed and the sun is shining, you can charge your car while it sits on your drive. When you consider that the average car isn’t used 95% of the time, it gives plenty of time to charge up from the sun for free,” Stacey says.

Plan for a future without oil

To depress oil demand, pain at the petrol pump alone is not enough. Encourage electric vehicle purchases en masse though. That’s according to research by Robert Hamlin, a senior lecturer in marketing at the University of Otago in New Zealand.

Hamlin studied the 1973 oil crisis, when producer countries implemented an embargo which quadrupled oil prices, to understand how consumer behaviour responds to fuel price shocks – and whether it might benefit the transition to EVs.

A sign announces no more gasoline sales while a man cycles in the background.
Can we make do with less oil to encourage green alternatives
Everett Collection/Shutterstock

“What do motorists do when they are confronted with a massive and sustained increase in petrol prices? As seen during the 1973 crisis and beyond, the consistent answer to this question is ‘not much’,” he says.

Hamlin cites the fact that New Zealand’s number of combustion engine-powered cars has increased in recent decades as evidence that motorists will not abandon oil in favor of going electric. “Instead,” he says, “household resources will be redirected away from … costs such as food, to pay for the increased cost of fuel.”

This would indicate that price signals and consumer choices alone are not sufficient to reduce climate change or ensure everyone can benefit from EVs. Instead, planning and policy by governments will be crucial.

One policy that would reduce how much oil we use is Shortening the work week. The UK enjoyed the bank holiday weekend in May, where many workplaces remained closed Monday. Dénes Csala, a lecturer in energy storage systems dynamics at Lancaster University, calculates that every bank holiday saves more than 100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.

That’s because fewer work days mean fewer car journeys, less heating and air conditioning in offices, and less energy demand in general. Csala claims that Britain could save a lot of carbon if it made long weekends a permanent fixture and switched to a four day week.

“The rule of thumb here is that at higher overall levels of electricity demand, more of that electricity will be generated from fossil fuels,” he says. This is because fossil fuel generators can be quickly started up to meet sudden shortages. How much CO₂ is produced to generate a unit of electricity at a particular time is called emissions intensity.

“Effectively replacing a work day with an extra weekend day … would potentially reduce energy consumption for that day by 10% and emissions intensity by 17.5%. These two effects add up: the lower electricity consumption of the weekend combines with lower carbon intensity, as there is less need to switch on polluting coal or gas plants, therefore potentially lowering emissions on any given day by 22% in May or 25% in January”, Csala says.

Expanding the weekend by a day could cut emissions from the UK’s electricity network equivalent to removing 1.2 million cars from the road. “It does not even count the carbon savings from the reduced traffic jams,” he says.

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