The Mystery of the Nord Stream Pipeline Explosion

Life is short and it’s a sin to waste your time. That’s a direct rip from the notebooks of Albert Camus (1913-1960) which I’ve been reading, and heeding, this first week of July. I’m working on a TV project about pipelines—oil and gas pipelines—and my research has brought me to a book called The Nord Stream Conspiracy by Wall Street Journal reporter Bojan Pancevski. It’s an interesting book. It’s not particularly well-written, but it is packed with information on Ukrainian spies who have until this moment not appeared (not really) in the Western press’s coverage of this war. Why that is is anyone’s guess. If you don’t know what the Nord Stream explosion is, you’d be forgiven for not knowing. It’s been called a “conspiracy” from the beginning, despite the fact, there’s nothing conspiratorial about the outcome; in September 2022, seismologists detected an undersea earthquake near the Danish island of Bornholm, which turned out to be a series of detonations along a $20 billion pipeline transporting Russian gas to Germany under the Baltic Sea. Within a minute, Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline ruptured and when Danish fighter jets were sent to survey the scene, pilots saw geysers three thousand feet in diameter, spewing methane into the ocean. They guessed, immediately, the underwater blasts were an act of sabotage. But who had done it? They didn’t know. In the days following the explosion, five hundred thousand metric tons of methane—the largest ever human-caused gas release—spread over the Baltic and killed more marine life than anyone can measure. When you read this book, the mystery isn’t “who did this” but rather, “who didn’t stop them?” It is abundantly clear the Russians did not blow up their own pipeline. Any 3rd grade child would guess the Ukrainians or the Americans (probably both) worked to achieve this outcome, and this is all to say, have we not learned this lesson? War is absurd. War is inflationary. To destroy things that were already built, to need to rebuild them is—if nothing else—an inflationary event. Vonnegut taught us this in Slaughterhouse Five, Camus’ entire philosophy is built on this idea. War is absurd. Stop doing it. If your ally or enemy is about to do something absurd, something inflationary, tell them to take a hike. Literally. Go into the mountains and take a twenty or thirty or forty-mile hike alone. At some point during that walk, they will exhaust themselves of stupid notions. Then we can return to some better, earlier, version of how to live with each other. On this earth.