COVID-19: The Beginning of the End for Oil?
Michael T. Klare says a vast restructuring of the global energy enterprise is happening now.
Among the first and most dramatic of these has been a shockingly deep decline in flying, automobile commuting, and leisure travel — activities that account for a large share of daily petroleum use. Airline travel in the United States, for example, is down by 95 percent from a year ago. At the same time, the personal consumption of electricity for telework, distance learning, group conversations and entertainment has soared. In hard-hit Italy, for instance, Microsoft reports that the use of its cloud services for team meetings — a voracious consumer of electricity — has increased by 775 percent.
