Oil as Achilles Heel

Lessons for leaders from the conflagration in Omsk

That’s a horse visiting a Gazprom station to look at the endless lines for fuel. Breeders are reporting a surge in sales across Russia

I visited Omsk once, or at least its airport; we were en route from Moscow to Ulan Ade on the Mongolian border, and the Aeroflot flight landed there to refuel. (It was a memorable journey; this was still the Soviet Union, and on boarding for the full-day flight, the stewardess handed each passenger a baggie with a scrawny chicken drumstick). All of which is to say, I’m equipped to pronounce, with the gravitas proper to a pundit, that Omsk is long ways from anywhere else.

Including the Ukrainian border, which makes it remarkable that Zelensky’s drone specialists managed to fly a whole squadron of their craft more than 2,500 kilometers from home and bomb the heck out of Putin’s largest oil refinery. It was the high point of an ongoing campaign designed to highlight what may be Russia’s greatest weakness: that it, like a number of other countries, is heavily dependent on oil.

Just as Donald Trump has proposed building American prosperity on the back of “energy dominance" via “liquid gold,” oil was supposed to be Russia’s strength, the source of its greatest riches. (John McCain memorably called it a “gas station with nukes.”) And indeed in the early days of the war Russia flexed its hydrocarbon muscle, threatening to cut off Europe’s gas supply. Throughout its invasion of its neighbor, Russia has relied on the often-covert export of oil via its fleet of “shadow tankers” to keep revenue flowing. Trump of course made this easier and more profitable for his buddy by temporarily lifting sanctions in the wake of our own ill-advised attack on Iran.

But if our attack on Iran has made other nations demonstrably more nervous about relying on the import of hydrocarbons, Ukraine’s attacks on Russia’s petroleum network should make them nervous about depending on the stuff even if they don’t have to bring it in from afar. It turns out that in the drone age it’s a very risky business, because it relies on colossal pieces of infrastructure that can’t be easily defended.

One of those is the supertanker—there’s one on fire today in the Gulf, apparently hit by an Iranian missile because it strayed from the Tehran-approved shipping lane. Ukrainian drones attacked another yesterday in the Sea of Azov, crippling the vessel. There’s essentially no defense for these slow-moving giant ships if an adversary with a few drones wants to take one out—they are, after all, a floating pool of flammable liquid.

Another vulnerability is the terminal where you load and unload the crude—Ukraine got one of those yesterday too, in occupied Crimea

The facility serves as a major logistics hub for petroleum products on the occupied peninsula, handling the receipt, storage and transfer of oil between rail infrastructure, storage tanks and tankers

And a third—and perhaps most exposed—is the refinery. An oil refinery is one of the most specialized pieces of equipment humans have ever built; anyone who’s ever driven by one on the highway will recognize that the tangle of pipes and tanks that makes each so complicated. It’s an industry truism that no two are alike.

That means that they’re highly vulnerable. If you aim your drone well, maybe it will smash, say, the ELOU-AVT-11 Unit, which at Omsk is what they call the thing that does the initial distillation and desalination of the crude. Without it, the secondary units that produce, say, gasoline and jet fuel have nothing to work with. And this is highly complicated equipment not easy to replace—given western sanctions, the current guess is six months to a year. And it’s not as if Ukraine has hit just that refinery—in fact, it was one of the last squares on a drone pilot’s bingo card. As Illia Kabachynskyi reports

It's also worth remembering that Ukraine has already hit all ten of Russia's largest refineries, some of them more than once. That means it's no longer a single plant waiting for repairs—it's effectively all of them at once, which piles additional pressure on repair crews and on the supply of replacement parts that are hard to source under sanctions.

Russia started this energy war, of course—over the years of the conflict it has targeted heating plants and the like, trying to freeze the fighting spirit out of the Ukrainians during their long winters. It’s been effective at producing cold, but not at winning the war; along with the attacks on schools, hospitals, and other civilian targets it seems to have helped reinforce the Ukrainian will to resist.

Now—with far more attention to avoiding civilian casualties—the Ukrainians are striking back, at defense plants, and especially at refineries. As Zelensky said this morning,

The very idea of Russia having a strategic rear is gone. For a long time, Russia believed it had territorial advantage no one else possessed, a deep rear, where it could safely keep everything its war depends on, believing no one could reach them. We have reached them.

But of course what’s at stake here is not just the oil that the Russian war machine runs on. In Russia, as in America, almost everything runs on oil. I remember that the one and only time that I sat down with Barack Obama, the first thing he told me was that “the price of gasoline is the most salient fact in American politics.” If that’s even close to the case in Russia, Putin better watch out: in occupied Crimea, gas prices are going above ten dollars a gallon. The government is desperately trying to import gasoline from as far away as India. As Pjotr Sauer reported this morning, police are having to draw guns to quell disturbances at gas stations where lines can stretch for kilometers, “fuel tourists” are crossing the borders with China and Kazakhstan to fill their tanks, and as a result

“Mass fatigue with the war is turning into mass irritation,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a Moscow-based political analyst. Even so, he said the shortages were unlikely to trigger widespread protests in Russia’s tightly controlled political system. “There is certainly shock, but the lack of any real means of influencing the situation – and the risks associated with trying to do so – make protests unlikely.”

This seems likely to get worse. Here’s a social media post from an Omsk resident watching the drone strikes: "Don't waste any time right now. Anyone with a car who's watching me - head to the gas station! The lines are about to get crazy."
And here’s an account of how Russian horse breeders are reporting a surge in sales because a steed is now cheaper to maintain than a car; check out the video of the equestrian cantering past the endless line at the gas station.

Ukraine has stood up to Russia’s attacks on its energy infrastructure mostly by starting to diversify: as Paul Hockenos reported last winter, the country is undergoing a rapid renewables revolution

According to estimates from the Solar Energy Association of Ukraine, the nation installed at least 1.5 gigawatts of new solar generation in 2025 — enough to power roughly 1.1 million homes — and grid operators intend to almost double the country’s renewable energy production over the next four years.

“Ukraine’s energy transition is not a slogan,” says Ievgeniia Kopytsia, a Ukrainian energy analyst at the Institute for Climate Protection, Energy and Mobility. “Since the full-scale invasion, Ukraine has added over 3 gigawatts of new renewable energy capacity. It’s a security-driven transformation, unfolding under extreme constraints, that prioritizes decentralization, flexibility, and speed of recovery.”

In the most basic terms, a single missile can take out a gas-fired power plant. But as Jeff Oatham of DTEK, Ukraine’s largest energy company and its largest private energy investor, explains,

“You would need around 40 missiles to do the equivalent amount of capacity damage at a wind farm.”

Solar, too, makes an unattractive target. “Attacking decentralized solar power installations is not economically rational,” says Ukrainian energy expert Olena Kondratiuk. “Missiles and drones are expensive, and significantly disrupting such systems would require a large number of strikes, while the overall impact on the energy system would remain limited.” Both solar and wind parks can function even when parts of them are out of operation.

That’s because sun and wind and batteries are not like oil—they are small, interchangeable pieces of infrastructure, easily subbed in. There aren’t chokepoints like refineries and tankers and terminals; there’s no cascading failure. My roof is covered with solar panels, and I suppose a saboteur could put a ladder against the wall and climb up there with a hammer and do some damage. But it wouldn’t shut down the electric grid across New England; it would be a problem, not a crisis. Which in turn is why no rational saboteur would ever bother.

And once you can run cars and heat pumps and cooktops off the power those panels and turbines generate, then you’re far more protected against attack. If Vladimir Putin had an electrified Russia he would worry far less about Ukrainian drones. Of course, if the world ran on electricity Russia would never have built up the treasury required to act like a bellicose beast.

Look, world leaders should be moving quickly to clean energy because it’s the one scaleable weapon in the war against climate change. But I’ll take any motivation—and I’ll count it as a real bonus if a cleaner world is also one where it’s harder to attack your neighbors because they don’t have vulnerable infrastructure. The peace dividend from sun and wind could be very real.

In other energy and climate news:

+Guy Trebay reports that for the rich climate change is less of a problem—they’re installing “snow rooms” in mansions and on yachts.

A snow room is more or less the opposite of a sauna — a cavelike space of ice and snow. In some, white flakes descend gently from the ceiling to create the feeling of being inside a snow globe.

The petrochemical billionaire Mukesh Ambani had one installed in Antilia, the skyscraper in Mumbai, India, that his family calls home. The 440-foot superyacht Serene, owned by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, also has one.

I’ll just note that these are precisely the people that have driven the temperature through the roof.

Meanwhile the Wall Street Journal is reporting that the new accessory every “hot girl” wants is a vintage gas-guzzling SUV, for which they’re willing to pay top dollar.

In wealthy zip codes and tony beach towns, shiny new luxury cars have taken a back seat as a status symbol. Instead, young women are pining for throwback, off-road SUVs. They’re “hot girl” cars—accessories meant to be flaunted on social media.

“I’ll just sit in a coffee shop and watch a million girls take a photo in front of my car,” said Tezza Barton, a 35-year-old content creator and founder in Los Angeles who got a brown 1995 Mercedes-Benz 230GE soft top SUV last year for about $100,000. “It’s the perfect backdrop.”

Classic cars have always enthralled collectors. Now interest in vintage Jeeps, Land Rover Defenders and Ford Broncos is surging for women who will pay top dollar for old cars, never-ending upkeep be damned. Kendall Jenner has a 1989 Toyota Land Cruiser. Sydney Sweeney has been spotted in Los Angeles driving a 1969 red Bronco she restored herself. Mega influencer Alix Earle often posts photos inside vintage pickup trucks and Broncos.

In this case I’ll just note that if they keep it up, they will be hot girls in more ways than one

+Andy Revkin has the tale of the Clearwater—the late Pete Seeger’s wonderful Hudson River sloop—being booted from a tall ships parade for daring to raise the idea of climate change

Clearwater was removed from the Sail4th 250 Parade of Sail by the USCG and escorted out of the Exclusion Zone by the US Coast Guard, US Navy, and NYPD.

Captain Rory Kane inquired why, and was informed the removal was due to the presence of banners reading: ‘Save the Clean Water Act and Indigenous Rights, Racial Justice, Climate Solutions’”.

A representative from Sail4th 250 informed the Captain the decision was ‘above them.’

+Just to get the numbers on the record, Trump’s efforts to stifle solar and wind projects are putting at least 92 gigawatts of clean cheap power on the shelf, Catherine Boudreau reports

More than $121 billion worth of early-stage renewable energy projects are at risk of getting caught up in the Interior Department’s permitting blockade, according to a Wood Mackenzie analysis.

That total represents a pipeline of 92 gigawatts of solar, wind, and battery storage projects planned on federal and private lands through 2029. They could be subject to heightened scrutiny by DOI under five policies published last year — including one that requires Secretary Doug Burgum’s office to sign off on permits rather than career bureaucrats. Wood Mackenzie’s analysis doesn’t include the some 29 gigawatts of onshore wind projects that the Pentagon is also holding up, citing national security concerns.

How much will that cost us? New modeling shows that meeting rising electric demand with renewable energy would save the country $5 billion a year compared with using fossil fuel.

Meanwhile, a new study shows that the costs of using gas to generate electricity are consistently underestimated. As Cassady Craighill writes

While utilities often seek approval for new gas plants based solely on their upfront construction costs, a new analysis by Current Energy Group and GridLab reveals these “sticker prices” omit a slew of hidden infrastructure costs, including mandatory, long-term contracts for firm pipeline transportation, gas storage and gas processing equipment.

Accounting for these fixed, decades-long fuel liabilities routinely inflates a project’s true cost to consumers by roughly 30%, significantly altering its economic competitiveness against cleaner energy resources. That’s like budgeting for the price of a new house and a new car next year, but failing to account for the closing costs and realtor fees, utility bills, moving expenses, insurance, taxes, gas and maintenance.

+As extreme heat waves plague much of the planet, Cam Fenton has a remarkable anniversary account of what may be the greatest heat dome anomaly yet, the 2021 catastrophe that saw temperatures reach 121 F in British Columbia

For most paramedics in Vancouver, shift change happens around 6:00 am, as the night crew leaves and the day shift takes over. It’s usually cool, especially in Vancouver, where the ocean breeze helps moderate the temperatures. But on June 28, 2021, it was already 22 C and rising when Jayne Hamilton started her shift.

“I knew it was going to be hot, I knew it was going to be miserable,” she explains. “I didn’t, even with that, have an understanding of how hot it was going to be.”

Like Ackerman, Hamilton was immediately dispatched to a cardiac arrest. By the time she cleared from that one, she was sent to another.

“Somewhere between the second and third one, we started commenting out loud that ‘this is not normal,’ ” she says. “When you’ve made it to three cardiac arrests before 10 o’clock in the morning, it’s odd.”

Hamilton is an advanced care paramedic. A specialist dispatched to the most serious emergencies, she has more training than the primary care paramedics who make up the bulk of the ambulance service. But even with that focus, Hamilton says “a heavy week of cardiac arrests” would be three in a four-day work block. But on June 28, she says she responded to 11 of the 27 that came across her dispatch computer.

“It seemed endless, like just an endless avalanche,” she says.

+The ten new winners of the Keeling Curve Prize were announced last week. They included Barefoot College International, which is training rural women to be solar engineers.

+From Brandon Loomis, an excellent piece in the Arizona Republic detailing just how bad things are getting on the Colorado River

The natural flow — a term for what likely would pass Lees Ferry if not for the dam and other impoundments above it — averaged 15.2 million acre-feet in the 20th century, according to Brad Udall, a climate research scientist at Colorado State University’s Colorado Water Center.

In this century so far, it has averaged just 12 million. The difference adds up to 80 million acre-feet over the 27 years since the reservoir last oscillated near capacity in the 1990s — a volume of lost water since 2000 that could have filled Lake Powell’s storage capacity more than three times over.

The average yearly flow during the worst 27-year period of the 20th century was more than a million acre-feet higher than during this megadrought. The last seven years have been bleaker still, averaging just 10.2 million acre-feet. Even stacked against the worst seven-year stretch of the 20th century, the last seven have brought an annual deficit of 1.7 million, a loss that’s more than five times the water that Phoenix, America’s fifth-largest city, supplies to its customers.

and there’s no big secret what’s going on

The Colorado River Basin is warming at a rate of 3 degrees Celsius per century, Udall said, compared with a global average rate of 2 degrees. Each degree Celsius is expected to reduce Colorado River flows by another 9% from increased evapotranspiration, he said, citing 2020 research by U.S. Geological Survey scientists published in Science magazine.

+Emily Pontecorvo reports on the Trump administrations latest efforts to permanently end efficiency standards for appliances

The Process Rule changes threaten the potential to create significant consumer savings, according to the Appliance Standards Awareness Project. The group estimates that based on recent technological advances, the DOE’s next round of standard updates could save the average U.S. household $160 per year on their utility bills, and businesses a collective $15 billion in annual operating costs over 20 years. The group also projects that updated standards have the potential to reduce summer peak electricity demand 34 gigawatts by 2040, which would be like taking New York City off the grid. There are climate benefits, too, of course — an estimated reduction of 800 million metric tons of carbon emissions through 2050.

+Online screening tonight of the important new documentary Vs Goliath, about the epic fight to head off more dangerous development in Cancer Alley

+We’re used to thinking of the dark satanic mills as the places where fossil fuel consumption really took off, but a new book argues it was really in people’s homes, especially in the Low Countries. Wout Saelens draws on

probate inventories, household manuals, personal journals, medical treatises and contemporary artwork to reveal how households in the early modern Low Countries embraced peat and coal to fuel new standards of warmth, light and domesticity.

+The Glacier Challenge is underway, and if you win you could become one of 18 people traveling to Colombia to work on glacier restoration

+Fascinating new study finds a tight link between gas stoves and asthma

At baseline, 10 individuals (11.8%) had an emergency room visit or hospitalization in the past 4 weeks. At follow-up, 3 individuals (3.5%) had an emergency room visit or hospitalization in the past 4 weeks (absolute difference -8.2%, 95% CI -16.2% to -3.4%). There were also significant improvements in missed work or school days. Indoor NO₂ levels decreased from 21.0 to 6.3 ppb (change -14.7, 95% CI -20.8 to -8.7).

+If you still think of it as “alternative energy,” high time to update your priors. The indefatigable Mark Gongloff chronicles the sheer size of the green economy

A recent report from the London Stock Exchange Group Plc (LSEG) found that “green economy” companies, or those that derive a significant portion of their revenue from stuff like clean energy, efficiency and water management, now have a total stock market value of $10 trillion. If this were a standalone sector, it would be bigger than healthcare and third in the world only to technology and industrials.

Since 2008, valuations for these companies have grown by 18% a year, compared with 12% for the broader market, the report found. Their stocks have outperformed global equities by 133%. A representative sample of these companies, the FTSE Environmental Opportunities All Share Index, topped the FTSE Global All-Cap Index by 12% last year.

In fact, this stealth sector just had one of its best years on record despite many of the world’s governments and the corporate sector abandoning their pre-Trump pledges to zero out carbon emissions to stave off the worst of global heating. Green revenues grew 5.3% last year, the fastest since 2022, the year of President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

Evidence keeps mounting that the green economy has entered a new phase, one where its rapidly improving economics give it lasting immunity from fickle political sentiments. Even as the dreams of the 2015 Paris Agreement, net zero, the IRA and more have crumbled, the technology with the power to make some of those dreams come true has only gained momentum.

“What the LSEG data shows us is that the green economy’s resilience is no longer dependent on politics,” Matthew Roling, founding executive director of the Abrams Climate Academy at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, said in a statement. “Energy security, grid reliability and supply chain security are now the primary drivers. Those are arguments that resonate in boardrooms. That’s a materially more durable foundation than the Paris Agreement consensus ever was.”

+Ketan Joshi has the numbers on just how fast the big tech companies are running up their electricity use to keep AI providing us with all the hallucinations we could ever want:

I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from Google’s latest climate report, but holy hell, I did not expect this.

The company’s total electricity consumption jumped from 31 terawatt hours (TWh) in 2024 to 43 TWh in 2025. This is very easily the biggest increase in their electricity consumption ever, and it puts them way ahead of Microsoft. It is almost certainly a reflection of the obscene energy hunger of their ever-expanding bloated generative AI systems, and a vindication of the warnings we’ve been raising for several years now.

That is to say, Google is using more juice than New Zealand or Nigeria or Morocco.

Google doesn’t even bother to pretend to be on track for its climate goals. Mix the foolish decision-making of FOMO-ridden executives with the most stunningly inefficient software tool big tech has ever created and you end up with a formerly efficient company turned into a blunt Bitcoin-style climate bomb, weirdly still convinced they’re saving the planet.

+Just to wrap up where we started, a kind of beautiful story out of Ukraine. It turns out that when the Netherlands (which has some history with windmills) replaces its wind turbines with more modern models, it is sending the old ones to embattled Ukraine, since they still have many years of life left. As Yuri Zoria reports

A Ukrainian entrepreneur named Serhii has already bought six of them. He runs a factory in the south that presses seed oil for the world market, and he wants nine turbines standing on a nearby hill by year’s end. His power supply is the reason. The grid gives him roughly two hours of electricity, then ten hours without. A single Dutch turbine can change that math.

The war reaches the machines too — Russian attacks target not only substations and conventional power plants but also solar and wind arrays. A Russian drone hit the blades of one, Serhii said, and his crew set about repairing it. He plans to order three more before the year is out.