More than the alternative system, the immediate problem appears to be that Europe is so badly dependent on Russian gas that cutting off swift will be a suicide for Europe.
Europe needs to move to renewables for residential and industrial use ASAP.
Or be more like France: about 70% nuclear generation of electricity.
Still dependent on gas pipelines to North Africa, but also building out its LNG infrastructure so it can buy from more sources.
They’re heavily promoting heat pumps for heating, but that also comes along with increased A/C use in a country that seems to culturally avoid it (in my depressing experience).
Curious to hear about how A/C use is culturally avoided. Is it seen as a negative social status signal to have the convenience? Or is the environmental impact a consideration?
iunno, more people than I could imagine there think air conditioning makes you sick.
To the point of opening windows on the highway instead of turning on the a/c that’s there.
My sample is limited, but it’s thinking I’ve never encountered in North America.
Having said that, construction usually has excellent shutters on windows, so you can block the sun effectively. Covered outdoor parking is common at malls in the south. Being and staying cool are encouraged, but a/c often isn’t.
Solidarity towards Ukraine by EU, would be to step up and proceed with blocking Russia from the SWIFT system.
The thing is, such a decision would impact EU citizens negatively in the short-medium term. And I think that level of solidarity is a hard sell, and hard to quickly measure support for, within each country's electorate.
The other issue, for Germany, is that removing them from SWIFT would be like clearing Russia's billions of debt obligations.
If there was any moment for EU to swallow a hard pill, would be now, and cut of gas import, rather than try to get consensus on blocking SWIFT access. It's the perfect time to apply that form of economical pressure, especially now that we're having a bit of early spring weather (though uncertain how long that will last).
Not sure about Cyprus, and others opposing the measure, what negative implications it would have for them and why they decided the way they did.
We are in such a bind almost only because the geniuses in charge of climate and energy policy in Germany thought it was a good idea to close all their nuclear capacity and replace it with intermittent renewables. The instability was to be plugged with cheap russian gas imports.
The solution is not clean wind and solar (which will fail when you get less wind and less sun, as in last September for example), but nuclear and mass electrification of heating systems.
Europe needs to move to renewables for residential and industrial use ASAP.