How
is the war in Ukraine shaping the politics of fossil fuel dependency,
and how might the conflict advance or hobble the global effort to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions? Here’s what people are saying. This is a fossil fuel war’One
of the largest producers of fossil fuels in the world, Russia is highly
dependent on its energy trade, with fossil fuels accounting for almost
half of its exports and 28 percent of its federal budget in 2020. |
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Germany
is especially dependent on Russian fossil fuels; it is Europe’s largest
energy consumer and Russia’s most important customer. That dependence
deepened after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, in 2011, when Angela Merkel committed to closing all of Germany’s nuclear plants. (The powerful earthquake that struck the same region of Japan on Wednesday was significantly less violent
than the one that caused the 2011 disaster and does not appear to have
damaged the country’s nuclear plants, even as it left two million homes
without power.) Russia now supplies more than half of Germany’s gas,
half of its coal and about a third of its oil, according to Bloomberg. Until recently, German leaders didn’t see this dependency as a problem. As Alec McGillis explains in The New Yorker, Germany actually chose
to rely on Russia “because it saw the economic links created by fuel
imports — physical links, in the form of pipelines through Eastern
Europe and under the Baltic Sea — as integral to keeping peace and
integrating Russia into the rest of Europe.” |
The big picture: In
the view of Svitlana Krakovska, Ukraine’s leading climate scientist,
who helped finalize the I.P.C.C. report from Kyiv as Russia invaded, the
war on her home country is inextricably linked to climate change.
“Burning oil, gas and coal is causing warming and impacts we need to
adapt to,” she told
The Guardian. “And Russia sells these resources and uses the money to
buy weapons. Other countries are dependent upon these fossil fuels; they
don’t make themselves free of them. This is a fossil fuel war. It’s
clear we cannot continue to live this way. It will destroy our
civilization.” |
How the war could spur climate action |
In
the immediate term, Germany and others could take measures to reduce
their consumption of Russian fossil fuels, as the Times columnist Paul
Krugman explains. Eliminating their use, though, would incur steep costs to the German people equivalent to those of a moderate recession. “It’s
not so simple to just say, ‘OK, overnight, now we’re going to suddenly
switch and no longer going to be dependent on natural gas from Russia,’
or fossil fuels in general,” Pete Ogden, vice president for energy,
climate and the environment at the U.N. Foundation, told Yahoo News. “Right now, you’re seeing that vulnerability exposed and there not being easy, short-term fixes to that problem.” But it’s evident that the fusion of foreign-policy and climate interests has lent more political momentum to decarbonization. Germany, for its part, just earmarked 200 billion euros
for investment in renewable energy production between now and 2026.
“Many of the strategies to lower dependency on Russia are the same as
the policy measures you want to take to lower emissions,” Thijs Van de
Graaf, a professor of international politics at Ghent University, told The Financial Times. “At the moments where we have these crises, the [energy] transition can be supercharged.” |
The
European Union has vowed to slash Russian natural gas imports by
two-thirds by next winter and to cut them out entirely by 2027. “That
would be an extremely ambitious timetable in peacetime, but if the
continent shifts to a war footing — as it must, with a savage conflict
playing out on its eastern borders — then it should be achievable,” The
Boston Globe editorial board writes. |
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Key
to the transition, the board adds, is increasing American production of
minerals and metals required for renewable energy technology. Russia is
a key supplier
of those materials, so the West needs to ensure it doesn’t become just
as reliant on Russia for clean energy production as it is now for fossil
fuels. |
In
The Times, Simone Tagliapietra, Georg Zachmann and Morgan Bazilian call
for a pact between North America and Europe to help the continent
reduce its short-term dependence on Russian fuel. “Such a pact could
also build an important foundation for cooperation in clean energy
innovation and deployment and reducing energy demand in the longer term —
which would significantly enhance Europe’s energy security,” they write. |
Four ways the war could derail climate action instead |
Fossil fuels — not renewable energy — end up filling the void. As energy prices soar, some fossil fuel executives have seized on the crisis as a business opportunity. At CERAWeek,
an annual energy conference that was held in Houston this month,
climate change was supposed to feature heavily. Instead, Kate Aronoff reports for The New Republic, the focus shifted to increased domestic fossil fuel production. |
“An
industry that’s spent the last two years and billions of dollars trying
to convince the world that it can ‘decarbonize hydrocarbons’ is much
too savvy to brag about all the money to be made off a humanitarian
catastrophe,” she writes. “Accordingly, the message fossil fuel execs
pivoted to, as Russian troops crept further into Ukraine, is that
they’re patriots, standing ready to meet the world’s energy needs and build American ‘energy independence.’” |
Countries rethink their priorities. As
politicians divert their attention to the invasion, investment in
climate mitigation and adaptation could find themselves on the back
burner, usurped by the perceived need for greater military spending. And
militaries are highly energy-intensive: According
to the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown
University, the Pentagon’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2017 exceeded
those of entire industrialized countries, such as Sweden, Denmark and
Portugal. |
“If war wins, climate action loses,” Andrew Sheng writes
for The Jakarta Post. “Increased defense expenditure will accelerate
energy and nonrenewable material consumption” as well as push up
emissions, “thus diverting scarce resources away from climate action.” |
The United States continues to suffer from political gridlock. While the Biden administration has made ambitious promises
to transition the country to net-zero emissions by 2050, his climate
legislation has been held up for months by members of his own party, and
the crisis in Ukraine has done nothing to move that particular needle. |
Even
Biden himself has been wary of connecting the war in Ukraine to climate
change. In his State of the Union address, he made glancing mention of
the issue, but “did not articulate the long-term opportunity for the
U.S. to lead the world in breaking free of the geopolitical nightmare
that is oil dependency,” said Paul Bledsoe, a strategic adviser to the Progressive Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank. |
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Military conflict crowds out cooperation. As my colleague Ezra Klein said
on a recent episode of his podcast with the economic historian Adam
Tooze, the goal of global decarbonization can be met only if countries
work together. But “the hotter conflict gets, the harder cooperation
gets,” he noted. |
It
bodes ill, then, that Russia, as one of the world’s largest producers
of fossil fuels, is vital to the international effort to eliminate
greenhouse gas emissions, and has so far shown a “critically insufficient”
commitment to that, according to Climate Action Tracker. If climate
diplomacy was halting during peacetime, what chance is there for it now? |
Tooze,
however, was more optimistic than Klein about the prospects for
decarbonization in an era of renewed great-power competition.
International cooperation is important, but “if you take the climate
problem as seriously as I think we have to at this point and as
seriously as I think big parts of the leadership in China increasingly
are, it’s a national interest issue,” he said. “You do it because you’ve
got to do it.”
Related: - War / 03.03.2022
- War on the horizon???/04.02.2022 #PutinsWar |
