immanence

The invasion of Ukraine has shifted media attention away from many other things, Covid and climate among them. But the climate implications of the war have not gone unnoticed.

To start with the obvious: Russia is a petrostate. As Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air analyst Lauri Myllyvirta writes,

More than a third of the Russian federal budget is funded from oil and gas revenues, half of which come from Europe. The dependence gives Putin not only a steady flow of cash but also leverage. […]

Putin deliberately prepared to exploit this reliance in the runup to the attack, with Russian energy giant Gazprom holding back gas deliveries to Europe and emptying the gas storage it operates in Germany at the start of this winter.

With Russian gas, oil, and coal sales fueling its military, there is good reason to consider this a “fossil fuel war,” as Ukrainian climate scientist and IPCC member Svitlana Krakovska has called it, that, if it continues, “will destroy our civilization.” It is, at the very least, a war that’s “fueled by the world’s addiction to oil,” as Nicole Goodkind puts it.

Several recent analyses divide the war’s implications into two sets of options. Viewed optimistically, according to the New York Times‘s Spencer Bokat-Lindell, the war is already leading to a slashing of Europe’s Russian natural gas imports — with Germany’s shelving of Nord Stream 2 and the EU’s decision to cut Russian gas imports by two-thirds this year — and it is likely to spur more rapid innovation toward decarbonization. Myllyvirta is also optimistic about Europe’s determination to “wean off” its dependence on Russia, with its plans to accelerate renewable energy production being both “technically and eocnomically achievable.”

On the other hand, the war could — and if the Biden administration’s response is an indicator, more likely would — lead to “filling in the void” with other sources of fossil fuels, accompanied by a “crowding out” of the international cooperation that’s needed to address climate change.

In an interview with Foreign Policy magazine, economic historian Adam Tooze (whose writings on the geopolitics of the current situation I’ve found invaluable) muses that while US sanctions against Russian oil revenues are “tiny,” Europe’s would not be. But they are offset by the current rise in gas prices, which has given Russia over $720 million a day this past week. In any case, the anticipated higher oil prices are, in Tooze’s assessment, “bad news for climate politics.” The Biden administration has put pressure on OPEC to increase production, and there is talk “of Washington pressuring Wall Street to release pressure on Texas to increase fracking production.” With looming and, for Democrats, worrying midterm elections coming up in November, fuel prices have risen to a top concern.

New Scientist‘s Adam Vaughan also assesses the short-term implications of the current conflict as not very good, with countries increasing domestic oil and gas production to fight against price rises, which risks “locking in” fossil fuel use for the foreseeable future. But energy security, diversification, and decarbonization remain the longer term goals. He quotes Columbia University energy analyst Jason Bordoff as comparing the potential impact of the current moment to the 1970s oil shock, which “prompted a massive rise in public spending on research and development in energy,” with nuclear, hydrogen, solar power, and automobile fuel efficiency all benefiting.

Domestically, it is time to put pressure on the Biden administration, as the New York Times‘s Farhad Manjoo has done, to call this a “fossil fuel war” and to “accelerat[e] our transition to cheap and abundant renewable fuels.” The Democrats, after all, have a plan for that (the Build Back Better Plan) that has not yet gone the way of the dodo.