Bright Young 2GreenEnergy Intern from Russia To Take on Difficult, Controversial Task: Critical Analysis of Her Mother Country’s Approach to Oil, Clean Energy

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’m working with an intern from Russia, a brilliant woman who’s working on a master’s program in Sustainable Energy Engineering (renewable energy, power generation and energy utilization in the smart buildings).  After a great deal of discussion, I suggested this:

You could write a series of pieces that collectively are called something like “Understanding Russia and Energy.”  In part, the series can be a critical reflection on this incredibly dense work:  “Oil of Russia Past, Present & Future.”

You could either agree with and expand on, or disagree and myth-bust, some commonly held beliefs among Americans.

First of all, you need to understand that very few Americans aspire to anything more than a surface level understanding of Russia, and that thin veneer is a product of what our mainstream media tells them, i.e., that Russia is run by a megalomaniacal tyrant who is indifferent to the welfare of his own people, not to mention the rest of the world.

Those with opinions beyond that would probably say:

• Russia is generally so corrupt that living there is miserable for any people who possess even meager levels of honesty and integrity.

• As long as oil is a valuable commodity on this planet, there will be little change in Russia, because of its vast reserves and underground resources.

• The cause for the oversupply (low price) of oil on the international markets is a drive to impede Putin in the Ukraine and elsewhere.

• Russia says it wants to move from an economy based on natural resources to one based on technological innovation, but that’s baloney.

• Russia is becoming more allied with China, and that this represents a threat to the U.S. in terms of national security.

• The pipelines that enable the flow of oil out of Russia (originally the USSR) are what led to the militarization of the countries to the south of you, principally Afghanistan, which in turn led to the steady stream of U.S. invasions over the last 25 years.  (Of course, these wars were entered under false pretenses; the American people are never told that our wars are about oil, even though that’s obviously and completely false.  Sadly, we’ll believe anything.  Please see the video linked in this post.)

• Though there has been privatization of oil companies since the demise of the USSR, there is no free market for oil in Russia.  (They don’t ask themselves:  How much worse could it be than the level of corruption that exists in the US between our federal government’s legislative branch (“Congress”) and the oil industry here?)

A small but growing number of Americans understand the vast long-term environmental damage being wreaked upon the planet, a great deal of which is caused by the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels.  In that regard, Russian oil is no better or worse that oil from Canada, Venezuela, or the Middle East.

My intern writes back:

I read some information concerning this topic and I found it very interesting.  It is tightly connected to my field of study, so I  already have some acquaintance with the subject.

Moreover it is always interesting for me to know what’s going on in this world, to comprehend politics and relations between countries, to analyze the situation. There are always two sides of the same coin, though sometimes people can see only one side; in most cases this is what our media says.  But we are people with brains, and we can think and make our own decisions taking to account all the facts.

Yes, even in Russia, not only in the US, some people hate our president, some of them, on the contrary, love him, but I can say only one thing: we can’t say exactly if our government is bad or good; we can only provide the information and let everybody decide for himself what to think about Russia.

Information is very important nowadays. We think we live in modern society; we are smart and clever enough to understand what is going on in this world.  But people normally think only what government wants us to think and shows us only what they want us to see. Lots of facts are hidden, and I don’t like that.

The same thing is true concerning oil and gas: people live and most of them really don’t care about how destructively it affects our planet and the future; all the time, since childhood, I have asked myself: how can we, people, creatures with intellect, build a modern world economy on fossil fuels, which overtly ruin our planet and ecology? Why do we treat our planet so badly?

There are so many opportunities to develop renewable energy sources, but we almost never use them.  Moreover, oil causes many conflicts/wars.  Yes, I was studying oil and gas at university, but these sources of energy I don’t respect at all, and maybe that’s why now I’m here (outside of Russia) studying renewable energy.

I really want to write some pieces about Russia and Energy.  Let me know exactly should I write about, and which topics to highlight.

I respond:  I’m so glad to hear that you’re looking forward to taking on the task.  I’m sorry, but I can’t be any more specific.

I could, of course, read that tome to which I linked below, but that would take a month.  Seriously.  It’s really one of the most detailed and scholarly things I’ve ever come across.

I believe that, if you simply write a few paragraphs addressing each of the issues I’ve named here, that readers would be very interested and grateful.  I know I would be.