Cover Story

How we chose this week’s image

Our cover this week brings together the two sides of the crisis in oil and gas. One is the energy shock—the most serious since the Middle Eastern oil crises of 1973 and 1979. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has supercharged high fuel and power prices and in most countries that is leading to inflation, weak growth, squeezed living standards and a savage political backlash. The other is the urgent requirement to move towards net zero carbon emissions by phasing out fossil fuels. If governments respond ineptly, they could trigger a relapse towards fossil fuels that makes it even harder to stabilise the climate. Instead they must follow a perilous path that combines security of energy supply with climate security.

A lot of our design effort this week was spent on that same perilous path, trying to get across the conflict between the energy transition and the shortage of oil and gas. As you will see, it is hard to keep two ideas in your head at the same time.

Here is an ingenious attempt. Cheaper dirty energy is no good if it comes at the expense of clean energy; the transition will fail if energy costs soar. During the transition, the world needs to find the ideal intersection between the two.

It’s clever, but we are in the middle of an energy crisis. And an (incandescent) lightbulb conveys a scientific breakthrough rather than the hard trade-off between conflicting imperatives.

These sparring pylons say that a fight is going on. But a fight between what exactly? If you look closely, the mast on the left has some oil drums beside it and the one on the right has a radiation warning. Although oil is rarely used to generate grid power these days, it’s true that eliminating fossil fuels means swapping carbon for uranium. However the energy transition also involves solar, wind, green hydrogen, as well as the short-run incentives for fossil fuels needed to keep the lights on and cars on the road.

The conflict is clearer still in this image of two deer locking horns, with oily antlers dripping gunge onto the eco-stag. It’s a striking image, but unless you already know what we are writing about, you will struggle to understand it. We have drifted too far from the ideas of an energy crisis and the green transition.

Attentive readers will recognise this image. It almost made the cover in March, when we wrote about how the transition to renewables will give rise to new electrostates supplying green metals such as copper and lithium. Back then we admired how simply by angling some chimneys energy becomes a weapon. However, to the eyes of commissioning editors, familiarity may be a handicap. Or perhaps this idea lacks precision, having been designed with a slightly different cover in mind. Either way, it failed for a second time.

This design brings together notions of renewables and crisis by sticking some wind turbines, solar panels and other kit onto the helmet of a GI. The helmet not only summons up images of war in Ukraine, but also serves as the framing device for the investments in future energy technologies. It says that renewables won’t make progress if the crisis isn’t dealt with, too.

This is a device we used at the end of 2018, when we were writing about chip wars between America and China. That was one mark against it. The other is that it is very American, whereas the energy crisis is global.

In the end, we didn’t have to create ambiguity. We found it in this haunting photograph, which embodies the duality that makes so many of our themes hard to illustrate. The jostling of turbines with ageing electricity poles creates a sense of transition. The crowding conveys unease and aggression. Are we looking at dawn or dusk?

All we needed to do was to zap the headline with 1,000 renewable volts.