Ukrainian activist and lawyer Svitlana Romanko was barred from entering the CERAWeek oil and gas conference in Houston last week. Romanko helped launch the Stand with Ukraine campaign, which sought to ban all fossil fuel imports from Russia following the invasion of Ukraine with the hope of ending the war and accelerating a clean energy transition. Romanko was never given a straight answer on why her CERAWeek registration was rejected last minute, but she guesses “the fossil fuel industry is actually scared by having someone from Ukraine attend.”
While oil and gas industry executives and high-level government officials discussed how they could profit off their idea of a clean energy transition—one completely reliant on carbon capture and rebranding the fossil fuels responsible for climate change ‘green’—amid geopolitical tensions and an ongoing war in Romanko’s home country, her unique expertise in the subject was barred from discussions. Instead, Romanko spent the week outside of the conference alongside US Gulf Coast activists calling for an end to fossil fuel projects in the Gulf and a just clean energy transition. (E&E News, The Independent, The Hill, Clean Technica)