…so…this is going to be late going up…& there’s a few reasons for that…but one of them is that I was too busy shaking my damn head…so before I try to get to anything else can I just take a moment to say that I don’t know if it’s the sort of thing that might have come up in the headlines for you but I ran into this

Boris Johnson has caused fury among political leaders across Europe – and outrage among opponents of Brexit at home – after he compared the resistance of the Ukrainian people to Russia’s invasion to the UK’s decision to leave the EU.

In a clear attempt to rally the Tory faithful behind a Brexit theme, the prime minister said in a speech to the Conservative spring conference in Blackpool that the world faced a moment of choice “between freedom and oppression”.

He went on: “There are some around the world, even in some western governments, who invoke what they call realpolitik. And you say that we’re better off making accommodations with tyranny.”

He then added: “And I know that it’s the instinct of the people of this country, like the people of Ukraine, to choose freedom, every time. I can give you a couple of famous recent examples. When the British people voted for Brexit, in such large, large numbers, I don’t believe it was because they were remotely hostile to foreigners. It’s because they wanted to be free to do things differently and for this country to be able to run itself.”

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/mar/19/pms-comparison-of-ukraine-resistance-to-uk-brexit-vote-criticised-as-crass

…& the fact that there are members of his party out there dutifully leaning on the technicality that he wasn’t trying to equate the two…which is as close to saying they admit it was a fucking stupid thing to say as they can without outright calling the man a callously opportunistic prick…but since I don’t happen to be a tory MP there’s nothing preventing me from calling him exactly that…in fact I’d go a good bit further…but I have other things to get to so I’ll let you draw your own conclusions

Satellite images from Maxar Technologies, a U.S. Defense contractor, this week showed the word [“CHILDREN” in huge bold letters] clearly written in front of and behind a theater that Ukraine says was sheltering women and children in the port city of Mariupol.

But on Wednesday, the building was blown up with hundreds of civilians inside, according to the Mariupol City Council.

“Russians could not have not known this was a civilian shelter,” Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said.
[…]
“It’s exactly the same playbook as we’ve seen before in Grozny, in Chechnya and in Homs and Aleppo in Syria,” said Justin Bronk, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a military-focused think tank in London.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/facing-resistance-ukraine-putin-turns-familiar-playbook-bombing-civilians

…so…not for nothing…there are more than a few things that can be pointed to as a direct comparison to putin’s invasion of ukraine…but even if you stretch credulity to breaking point…the only state sponsored force in the UK destroying theatres, worsening the plight of women & children in need of shelter & support or reducing the availability of medical assistance to those in need…is the conservative party…& not uncoincidentally…fucking brexit…so…if it weren’t for the depths to which the bar has in fact been lowered…that ought to have made boris the holder of the prize for dumbest shit said for domestic political gain in connection with the ongoing tragedy unfolding in ukraine…but obviously someone out there has a full time job holding fox news’ beer

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/18/sergei-lavrov-praises-fox-news-coverage-ukraine

Vladimir Putin was “channeling his inner Trump” when he staged a huge rally in Moscow to trumpet his invasion of Ukraine, Sean Hannity said on Friday.

On a day when the Russian foreign minister praised Fox News for “trying to present some alternative point of view”, and amid controversy over Fox News hosts and guests repeating Russian disinformation, Hannity also mocked Joe Biden and read out a Kremlin statement attacking the US president.

First, on his his radio show, Hannity said: “It looks like Vladimir Putin is channeling his inner Donald Trump. He had a what looked like, it almost looked like the big house in Michigan – their football stadium I think holds 110,000 people.”
[…]
As the Guardian reported, Putin spoke from a stage featuring slogans such as “For a world without Nazism” and “For our president”, and told “a large flag-waving crowd” Russia “hasn’t seen unity like this in a long time”.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/mar/19/vladimir-putin-donald-trump-rally-sean-hannity

Hannity using a statement from a Kremlin spokesperson to launch his attacks on Biden pic.twitter.com/lMpOyDCSax

— Acyn (@Acyn) March 19, 2022

…maybe they think it’s some sort of free trade deal…russia quotes the crap tucker spouts

Last week, two Fox News journalists died in Ukraine, and the news channel grieved along with the rest of the country amid anger at the Russian onslaught. Republicans, too, rapidly shed past views on Russia and some called for no-fly zones and supplying Ukraine with Polish MiG fighter jets as Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion ground on.

But the far-right Fox News host Tucker Carlson, the alternately flabbergasted and outraged primetime host and Trumpist standard-bearer, carried on presenting his conspiratorial show with such a seeming lack of regard that the Kremlin itself reportedly considers his equivocations over the causes of the conflict vital to its propaganda apparatus.

Even Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov – no doubt largely thanks to Carlson – had praise for Fox’s coverage of the conflict. “If you take the United States, only Fox News is trying to present some alternative points of view,” he said on Friday.

But no action has apparently yet been taken by Fox News executives to rein Carlson in. The 52-year-old host has taken on the mantle of “Tucker the Untouchable”, even taking huge public offense when a senior Republican lawmaker called his show “an organ of disinformation”.
[…]
Outrage is, of course, Carlson’s specialization. On Thursday, he amped it up after McCaul’s comments. “In other words, not only are we wrong – which is fine – we’re disloyal Americans doing the bidding of a foreign power. It’s not fine. It’s slander,” he fumed. Carlson went on to accuse McCaul and other Republicans of “talking like Joe Biden”, who “calls anything he doesn’t like ‘Russian disinformation’”.

And that, typically enough, returned him to the subject of Hunter Biden, who is reportedly being investigated by the Department of Justice over payments he received from a number of foreign companies, including the Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
[…]
Last weekend, the US website Mother Jones reported that the Kremlin told Russian media it was “essential” that Carlson’s pro-Putin rhetoric was aired, though the outlet did not publish the documents it cited.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/mar/20/tucker-the-untouchable-fox-news-host-putin-russia

…& sean does them a solid by repeating their bullshit verbatim as though it deserves to be taken at face value…although…he’s not alone

So this is a Rupert Murdoch publication trying to intimidate national security folks, right? pic.twitter.com/inRRYZxPnI

— Molly Jong-Fast (@MollyJongFast) March 19, 2022

…& maybe we can’t expect everyone to break out the red pencil the way the canadian UN folks did with that russian letter the other day…but…could we maybe get a little more of this sort of thing?

This is how you write a headline to expose politicians operating in bad faith. Kudos to whoever wrote this at the @washingtonpost. pic.twitter.com/bf0lNFwa5m

— Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) March 19, 2022

Thirty-one Senate Republicans voted last week against the $1.5 trillion spending bill to fund the government, increase U.S. defense spending and provide humanitarian and military assistance to Ukraine. In recent days, many of them have clamored for more weapons and aid.
[…]
“President Biden needs to make a decision TODAY: either give Ukraine access to the planes and antiaircraft defense systems it needs to defend itself, or enforce a no-fly zone to close Ukrainian skies to Russian attacks,” [Rick] Scott said in a statement. “If President Biden does not do this NOW, President Biden will show himself to be absolutely heartless and ignorant of the deaths of innocent Ukrainian children and families.”
[…]
After casting a “no” vote, Scott assailed the overall spending bill as wasteful, arguing that it was filled with lawmakers’ pet projects. “It makes my blood boil,” Scott said last week.
[…]
[Josh] Hawley, who voted against the spending bill with billions for Ukraine, said Wednesday that Biden needs to “step up” and send MiG jet fighters and other weapons to Ukraine, accusing the administration of “dragging its feet.”
[…]
In a statement Thursday, Hawley said, “Aid for Ukraine should not be held hostage to the Democrats’ pet projects and I did not support the massive $1.5 trillion omnibus spending bill stuffed with billions in earmarks.”
[…]
“It’s very simple: If you don’t vote for the thing, you’re not for the thing,” [Brian] Schatz said. “That is literally our job, to decide whether we are for or against things as a binary question.”

“So you don’t get to say: ‘Even though I voted against Ukraine aid, that I’m actually for it, and here’s my explanation,’” Schatz added, arguing that Republicans were trying to have it both ways by maintaining their fidelity to Trump — who has praised Russian President Vladimir Putin — and become “Zelensky fans” at the same time.

“They voted to exonerate Trump for this specific reason, which was to withhold aid from Zelensky, and here they are again, opposing aid to Zelensky,” Schatz said. “So now they’re doing it twice. They’re still acting as if they’re defenders of Western-style democracy.”

The day before voting against the bill, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), another possible presidential candidate, posted on Twitter about the need to come to Ukraine’s aid. “Helping Ukraine defend itself against a ruthless dictator is in our best interest,” he tweeted.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/17/republicans-ukraine-aid-vote/

…& you know…when there was a south park episode about how america was founded on the principle of saying one thing while doing the other…I laughed…but this is a joke too sick to raise a smile…while these assholes are busy trying to get the best domestic mileage they can out of an international incident widely agreed to be staring down a precipitous slope at prospects including global conflict between nuclear powers…this is what they’re doing with a freedom of speech they seem to see no irony in exercising for ends they consider to be in their wider interest…whatever happened to “trust, but verify”?

The Russian Ministry of Defense released a video early Saturday that it claimed showed a Kinzhal hypersonic air-launched ballistic missile hitting a Ukrainian missile warehouse about 300 miles southwest of Kyiv. The strike, if it did occur, would represent both the first known use of the Kinzhal in combat and yet another Russian attack on facilities in western Ukraine near the country’s borders with multiple NATO members. But there are elements of Russia’s claims that don’t quite add up and the implications of the use of Kinzhal in the conflict are limited, regardless.
[…]
The claimed target was an underground missile storage facility in Delyatyn, Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast. A quick check of maps shows the Delyatyn base on the north side of the Carpathian Mountains, close to Ukraine’s borders with Romania and Hungary. Delyatyn fits the bill for a missile or ammunition storage facility, with bunkers built into terrain and away from built-up civilian areas.

▫️Destruction of a weapons depot of the Armed Forces of Ukraine by high-precision missile weapons strike. We can see the exact hit of an underground hangar with weapons and ammunition. pic.twitter.com/sKTF46Tdb0

— Минобороны России (@mod_russia) March 19, 2022

But considering air defenses were clearly a reason to use such a high-end capability to hit the weapons bunker, it further begs the question of how a lowly Orlan-10 unmanned aerial vehicle managed to get over the supposed target area to film the attack.
[…]
Above all else, maybe the most pressing question is why was this capability used now? Why weren’t Kinzhals used during the opening hours and days of the conflict to blind command and control, knock out air defenses, and neuter the enemy’s ability to effectively fight in a coordinated manner? That question is still very much up for debate as is Russia’s overall capacity to execute a modern integrated military operation. But in the meantime, the peculiar use of standoff weapons, and in small numbers, tells a lot about Russia’s stocks of precision-guided weaponry — although these revelations are not really all that new — and especially when it comes to the more expensive and advanced standoff kind. Maybe it is a sign that Iskander-M stocks are already running low.

In the end, not everything adds up here. That’s just the reality. It is just as possible we are seeing a standard Iskander-M attack in the video as one by Kinzhal, although maybe we will get more proof otherwise. The fact that sources in the U.S. government have also confirmed Kinzhal’s use points to the possibility that maybe its target was different than what was claimed, and this would fit with the discrepancies with the video. It’s also possible that the U.S. assessment will change as this is still a very new development.
[…]
UPDATE:
We can now say for certain that the strike depicted happened nowhere near the western part of the country and not at some major military weapons storage area. It happened at a heavily bombarded rural area in the far eastern area of Ukraine:
[…]
In satellite imagery The War Zone obtained from Planet Labs, you can clearly see the farm featured in the video. It was partially destroyed by the time the image was taken, on March 12th, 2022, a week before this video was released and news of Kinzhal’s use was distributed:
[…]
This also answers our question as to the UAV’s presence above the target area. The anti-air threat is nothing in Ukraine’s east as it is in the west. This also calls into question, even more, why a missile of Kinzhal’s nature would be used on a target close to Russian territory and on what appears to be a farm’s barn or large chicken coup.

With all this in mind, it is very unlikely we are seeing a Kinzhal missile being used in the video. Whether or not one was used at all, we cannot answer that. Maybe there was another target somewhere, but this was not it.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/44840/we-have-questions-about-russias-claimed-kinzhal-hypersonic-missile-use-in-ukraine

…& I know I’m a little out of practice with these…& in danger of going off on a tangent

In 2022 the war came but seemingly without the cyberapocalypse and waves of pummeling digital strikes we expected. “Cyberattacks on Ukraine Are Conspicuous by Their Absence,” headlined The Economist a week into the war.

Such claims, however, are misleading. Cyberwar has come, is happening now and will most likely escalate. But the digital confrontation is playing out in the shadows, as inconspicuous as it is insidious. Several interlocking dynamics of cyberoperations in war stand out from what we have seen in Ukraine so far.

First, some cyberattacks are meant to be visible and, in effect, distract from the stealthier and more dangerous sabotage. On Feb. 15 and 16, Ukrainian banks suffered major denial-of-service attacks, meaning their websites were rendered inaccessible. Western authorities swiftly attributed the attacks to Russia’s intelligence service, and Google is now helping protect 150 websites in Ukraine from such attacks. The Anonymous collective declared cyberwar against the Russian government soon after the attack and obtained a trove of data from a German subsidiary of Rosneft, a major Russian state-owned oil firm. Ukraine’s besieged government has embraced the idea of a crowdsourced I.T. army.

But these attacks and the decentralized volunteerism are simply a distraction. In fact, often the most damaging cyberoperations are covert and deniable by design. In the heat of war, it’s harder to keep track of who is conducting what attack on whom, especially when it is advantageous to both victim and perpetrator to keep the details concealed.

The day the Russian invasion started, ViaSat, a provider of high-speed satellite broadband services, suffered an outage. The services of Ka-Sat, one of its satellites, were seriously affected. The satellite covers 55 countries, predominantly in Europe, and provides fast internet connectivity. Among the affected Ka-Sat users: the Ukrainian armed forces, the Ukrainian police and Ukraine’s intelligence service.

[…] Just hours before the invasion started, two cyberattacks hit Ukrainian targets: HermeticWizard, which affected several organizations, and IsaacWiper, which breached a Ukrainian government network. A third destructive malware attack was discovered on March 14, CaddyWiper, again targeting only some systems in a few unidentified Ukrainian organizations. It is unclear if these wiping attacks had any meaningful tactical effect against the victims, and the incidents never broke into the news cycle, especially when compared to the physical invasion of Ukraine by tanks and artillery.

Finally, without deeper integration within a broader military campaign, the tactical effects of cyberattacks remain rather limited. Thus far, we have no information on Russian computer network operators integrating and combining their efforts in direct support of traditional operations. Russia’s muted showing in the digital arena most likely reflects its subpar planning and performance on the ground and in the air. Close observers have been baffled by the Russian Army’s insufficient preparation and training, its lack of effective combined arms operations, its poor logistics and maintenance and its failure to properly encrypt communications.

Cyberwar has been playing a trick on us for decades — and especially in the past weeks. It keeps arriving for the first time, again and again, and simultaneously slipping away into the future. We’ve been stuck in a loop, doomed to repeat the same hackneyed debate, chasing sci-fi ghosts.

Why You Haven’t Heard About the Secret Cyberwar in Ukraine [NYT]

…or just generally going on…but the dizzying amounts of demonstrably untrue stuff getting trotted out in service of political ends is getting to me

The most important argument against autocracy is, of course, moral: Very few people can hold unrestrained power for years on end without turning into brutal tyrants.

Beyond that, however, in the long run autocracy is less effective than an open society that allows dissent and debate. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, the advantages of having a strongman who can tell everyone what to do are more than offset by the absence of free discussion and independent thought.

I was writing at the time about Vladimir Putin, whose decision to invade a neighboring country looks more disastrous with each passing day. Evidently nobody dared to tell him that Russia’s military might was overrated, that Ukrainians were more patriotic and the West less decadent than he assumed and that Russia remained highly vulnerable to economic sanctions.

But while we’re all justifiably obsessed with the Ukraine war — I’m trying to limit my reading of Ukraine news to 13 hours a day — it’s important to note that there’s a superficially very different yet in a deep sense related debacle unfolding in the world’s other big autocracy: China, which is now experiencing a disastrous failure of its Covid policy.
[…]
The thing is, all of these failures, like Putin’s failures in Ukraine, ultimately stem from the inherent weakness of autocratic government.
[…]
And as I said, a government that lies all the time has trouble getting the public to listen even when it’s telling the truth.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/17/opinion/china-russia-xi-jin-ping.html

…it’s true…but what staggers me about it is that it’s not as though we’ve been in need of exaggerating things, much less making them up…but it keeps happening & the waters get muddier

Adam Fox, Brandon Caserta, Barry Croft Jr and Daniel Harris were charged in October 2020 with conspiring to abduct Whitmer from her northern Michigan vacation house. Their motive, say prosecutors in Grand Rapids, was anger over the Democrat’s Covid-19 restrictions and their plan has become a symbol of rising far-right violence and the threat it represents to US democracy.

At the moment the FBI arrested the men, prosecutors argued in court, they had plans to acquire a bomb to blow up a bridge near Whitmer’s home to hinder police. Jurors, they have said, would see social media posts and hear secretly recorded conversations, highly inflammatory language and details of a plan to take down a “tyrant”.

When they were arrested the case seemed a slam dunk. But as more evidence has unfolded and the trial has begun, a different narrative has emerged. Far from being a dedicated bunch of coup-plotters, their attorneys argue, the Wolverine Watchmen are hapless victims of FBI entrapment who had been induced by paid informants to commit crimes they would not otherwise have considered.

The FBI, according to defense filings, deployed at least 12 informants, as well as several undercover agents. “There was no plan, there was no agreement and no kidnapping,” defense attorney Joshua Blanchard said last week.

It is not an entirely outlandish claim. The defense’s argument of FBI entrapment draws on a long history. In the post 9/11 era, when internal US security agencies focused on the existence of Muslim extremist plots, several prosecutions, including of the Newburgh Four, hinged on informants actively promoting a plot before turning would-be perpetrators over to the government to be tried on conspiracy charges.

Activists and civil rights experts have argued that the FBI has frequently overstepped boundaries, essentially egging on people to participate in plots and locking up people for crimes that they would never have committed had it not been for the intervention of law enforcement.
[…]
“When these tactics first started it was easy to get the public on the FBI’s side just by making allegations,” [Mike] German [author of Disrupt, Discredit and Divide: How the FBI Damages Democracy] said, recalling the case of the Liberty City Seven – a Muslim extremist plot to blow up Chicago’s Sears Tower that ended, after three trials, in five convictions.

“The problem is, they’re manufacturing crimes and that’s not the job of a law enforcement agency – to make themselves look good by solving crimes they create – and there’s no legitimate government purpose in manufacturing a plot,” he said.

Another issue, German says, is that there’s more white supremacist/far-right activity in the US than there ever was Muslim extremism. But the federal government doesn’t maintain a database on white extremist violence, lumping all extremism – white nationalist, environmentalist – in one category under the Hate Crimes Statistics Act (1990) and the National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism, announced last year.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/19/michigan-governor-kidnap-case-terrorists-fbi-dupes-gretchen-whitmer

…& all the while the likes of the NYT keep wheeling out the suggestion that what’s called for is realism

A Realist Take on How the Russia-Ukraine War Could End [NYT]
[…although to be fair that’s an interview with a lady who at least knows what she’s talking about]

Trapping a bear makes it more desperate, not less dangerous. Moscow, squeezed by sanctions and facing larger NATO military budgets, may resort to extraordinarily risky measures to forestall decline. It was precisely this logic — complete with the prospect of crushing restrictions by a superior economic power and weapons shipments to a weaker military foe — that led Hitler to Barbarossa and imperial Japan to Pearl Harbor. However, the authoritarian great powers of the 20th century, which gambled that escalating conventional military conflicts might bring Western rivals to the negotiating table before economic isolation reduced their own national power beyond repair, are unlike modern Russia in one key respect: Russia has nukes to gamble with.

Realism Must Guide Our Reaction to Russia’s Invasion [NYT]

…it sounds trite to talk about stories when there are literal matters of life & death playing out but it also seems as though denying the power of narrative in the face of all this is a fool’s errand…so here’s a word from someone who knows a bit about selling fiction

I thought it would be obvious that the point of the fictional world in Occupied was not to say anything about Russia – just as Steven Spielberg’s aim in Jaws was not to say anything about great white sharks. However, the Russian authorities did not take it very well. Vyacheslav Pavlovsky, the ambassador to Norway, told the Russian news agency Tass that “it is certainly regrettable that in this year, when the 70th anniversary of the victory in the second world war is being celebrated, the authors have seemingly forgotten about the heroic contribution of the Soviet army in the liberation of northern Norway from the Nazi occupiers, and decided, in the worst cold war tradition, to frighten Norwegian viewers with a nonexistent threat from the east”.

It may be that the ambassador was a little touchy, because Russia had annexed Crimea the year before. But Occupied had been written and put into production long before that and it was a work of fiction in which, for once, the Russians weren’t depicted as a group of robotic, uniformly evil “bad guys”. So why the fury?

Perhaps the answer is that in an era in which the truth has been devalued by fake news, in which leaders are elected on a wave of emotion rather than their merits or political viewpoints, facts no longer carry the weight they once did. In writing about Russia’s latest war in Ukraine, a frequently used quotation comes from the US senator Hiram Johnson, who said in 1917 that “the first casualty, when war comes, is truth”. It is used, among other things, to remind journalists of just how vulnerable the truth is when two sides are fighting for the dominance of their own version of events.
[…]
Today, the entire world is essentially sitting in the same movie theatre, watching events unfold in Ukraine. But what we are seeing – figuratively speaking – are dubbed versions, featuring subtitles in our own languages. There is a battle under way between different versions of the story, and the best one will prove triumphant.

The question, therefore, is what measures we are prepared to take to win those hearts and minds, especially when Vladimir Putin is deploying the kind of censorship and propaganda we thought had been banished to the past. Is it desirable – or appropriate, even – to play by his rules? It seems contradictory that a democratic country would give up principles such as freedom of speech and transparency, even in an attempt to temporarily protect those freedoms.

We might hope that the truth – the imperfect, subjective truth of a journalist, an artist or some other storyteller who is trying to express something true – will win. There are examples of this, after all, such as a Soviet Union that collapsed from within or a Donald Trump who was thrown out of the White House. Faced with an exhausting tangle of different versions of reality, we do not have to give in and accept that every version is equally true. Some really are more true than others.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/17/vladimir-putin-power-stories-occupied-jo-nesbo

With impeccable timing, Marie Yovanovitch delivers Lessons from the Edge, her memoir. The author is the former US ambassador to Ukraine who Trump fired during his attempt to withhold aid to Kyiv in return for political dirt, an effort that got him impeached. For the first time.
[…]
On the page, Yovanovitch berates Trump for “his obsequiousness to Putin”, which she says was a “frequent and continuing cause for concern” among the diplomatic corps. Trump, she writes, saw “Ukraine as a ‘loser’ country, smaller and weaker than Russia”. If only thousands of dead Russian troops could talk.

Trump was commander-in-chief but according to Yovanovitch, he didn’t exactly have the best handle on where his soldiers were deployed.

At an Oval Office meeting in 2017 with Petro Poroshenko, then president of Ukraine, Trump asked HR McMaster, his national security adviser, if US troops were deployed in Donbas in eastern Ukraine, territory now invoked by Putin as grounds for his invasion.

“An affirmative answer to that question would have meant that the United States was in a shooting war with Russia,” Yovanovitch writes.

In the moment, she says, she also pondered if it was “better to interpret Trump’s question as suggesting that the commander-in-chief thought it possible that US troops were fighting Russia-led forces, or instead as an indicator that the president wasn’t clear which country was on the other side of the war against Ukraine”.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/mar/20/lessons-from-the-edge-review-marie-yovanovitch-trump-putin-ukraine

…mind you…when it comes to trying to tell divergent stories about the same subject…ukraine isn’t the only front on which the outcome is both contested & of global significance

Climate scientists and fossil fuel executives use the same terms when they talk about an energy transition. But they mean starkly different things.
[…]
But even as longtime adversaries use the same terminology, calling in unison for an “energy transition,” they are often talking about starkly different scenarios.

According to the scientific consensus, the energy transition requires a rapid phasing out of fossil fuels and the immediate scaling up of cleaner energy sources like wind, solar and nuclear.

But many in the oil and gas business say the energy transition simply means a continued use of fossil fuels, with a greater reliance on natural gas rather than coal, and a hope that new technologies such as carbon capture and sequestration can contain or reduce the amount of greenhouse gasses they produce.
[…]
The phrase has become what is known in linguistics circles as a “floating signifier,” Dr. [Anthony] Leiserowitz [the director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication] said. He called it “a blank term that you can fill with your own preferred definition.”
[…]
Climate researchers point out that there is little room for ambiguity. With increasing urgency, a series of major scientific reports has underlined the need to phase out fossil fuels and the damaging effects of planet warming emissions.
[…]
Those in favor of a fast pivot to clean energy contend that the war in Ukraine, which has put a spotlight on Europe’s heavy reliance on Russian oil and gas, has only driven home the urgent need to transition away from fossil fuels.
[…]
The general public is also broadly supportive of a determined move away from fossil fuels, with 69 percent of Americans saying that developing sources of clean energy should be a high priority for leaders in Washington, and the same share supporting a transition of the U.S. economy to 100 percent clean energy by 2050, according to recent polling by the Pew Research Center. At the same time, though, just 31 percent of those polled thought the United States should phase out fossil fuels entirely.
[…]
Oil and gas executives, however, have a very different view of how the energy transition should play out.
[…]
Fossil fuel executives cited the war in Ukraine as proof that their industry remains indispensable. Many major oil and gas companies have pledged to ramp up production in the short term in an effort to stabilize global energy markets, even as they talk up their part in the energy transition.

Darren Woods, the chief executive of Exxon Mobil, said in a speech that his company was increasing oil production while at the same time using its technology to help address the challenge of “reducing greenhouse gas emissions and supporting the transition to a net zero future.” Exxon is among several big oil and gas companies to invest in efforts to capture and store carbon, and to produce energy with hydrogen, which is derived from fossil fuels but produces fewer greenhouse gas emissions.

And in an interview in Washington last week, Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Western Energy Alliance, which represents oil and gas companies, dismissed the idea that the “energy transition” meant a significant drop in the use of fossil fuels. She noted that the Energy Information Agency last year predicted that demand for oil and gas will continue to rise steadily through 2050.

“We can talk about this idealistic supposed future where there’s no oil, natural gas and coal,” Ms. Sgamma said. “But that’s not the reality.”
[…]
“So if we’re going to talk about a transition, let’s find something that we can transition to, because right now we don’t have a technology that can provide all of our needs 24-7. Flat out we don’t,” she said. “So just realistically, we’re going to be here through 2050 and many years after.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/19/climate/energy-transition-climate-change.html

…still before you wind up feeling like it’ll take me a similar timeframe to get to the end of this…I’ll shut up & leave you to your sunday…except for the part where I still need to come back here & drop in a few tunes