Seeing Ukraine war through climate lens
Russia’s invasion is
yet another reason to switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy, experts say.
You know that scene in “The Matrix” where Keanu Reeves is offered a choice between ignorance and truth, in the form of a blue pill and a red pill? If he takes the blue pill, he’ll forget the unsettling reality he’s begun to uncover, and go on living his life like everything is fine. But if he takes the red pill, he’ll learn the truth about the world — and he’ll never be able to unlearn it.
Well, paying attention to climate change is like taking the red pill. Once you do, nothing will ever look the same.
The weather, a hike, a trip to the grocery store — you might start seeing it all through a climate lens. Should the Super Bowl really be this hot? How much of this trail is still recovering from the latest wildfire? How often should you be eating meat?
Russia’s attack on Ukraine is no exception — the climate impacts are legion. Europe is heavily dependent on Russian oil and gas, and security experts say accelerating the global transition away from fossil fuels — and toward clean energy — could help limit Vladimir Putin’s geopolitical influence.
“There’s been a lot of concern about dependence on Russian [natural] gas, and whether that inhibits countries’ ability to stand up to Russia,” said Erin Sikorsky, director of the Center for Climate and Security in Washington. “The more that countries can wean themselves off oil and gas and move toward renewables, the more independence they have in terms of action.”
A few days later, as missiles flew over Ukraine, the United Nations dropped a different kind of bombshell.
The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a landmark report finding that more than 3 billion people are highly vulnerable to rising global temperatures, and that heat-trapping emissions continue to increase even as the crisis deepens. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres called the report “an atlas of human suffering.”
“The world’s biggest polluters are guilty of arson of our only home,” he said.
The United States is the biggest polluter of all, responsible for about 25% of historical carbon emissions. Russia isn’t far down the list, contributing 6% of cumulative global emissions.
Putin, though, has often seemed more focused on the potential benefits to Russia of melting Arctic sea ice opening up new shipping routes. And while President Biden has pledged steep cuts to carbon emissions, his most ambitious climate plans have been blocked by congressional Republicans — and at least one Democrat, Sen. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia.
The war in Ukraine offers U.S. and European leaders an opportunity to advance clean energy while combating Putin — and at least some of them are taking advantage of it. The European Union is finalizing a strategy to slash the continent’s use of natural gas, in part by accelerating deployment of solar power, renewable hydrogen and energy efficiency.
But as is too often the case, short-term political expedience may prevail over the climate imperative.
With gasoline prices rising in part because of Russian aggression — the country is a major oil exporter — Biden said in his State of the Union address that the U.S. will release 30 million barrels of oil from the strategic petroleum reserve, as part of a coordinated plan among the U.S. and its allies to keep gasoline prices steady. Those oil releases aren’t going to make or break international climate efforts. But Biden discussed the urgency of climate action only briefly during his State of the Union.
Meanwhile, the U.S. and Europe have declined to cut off the flow of Russian oil and natural gas, despite hitting Putin with other sanctions. The Biden administration is worried about causing gasoline prices to rise further.
Conservative politicians and the fossil fuel industry want to see Biden take longer-term steps to boost U.S. oil and gas, such as approving export terminals and leasing more federal lands for extraction.
Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) urged Biden last week “to restart America’s energy production.” Mike Sommers, chief executive of the American Petroleum Institute, an industry trade group, wrote, “At a time of geopolitical strife, America should deploy its ample energy abundance — not restrict it.”
That’s one option — but according to energy experts, it would lock in dependence on fossil fuels that humanity can’t afford.
Another option is ramping up investments in solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, electric cars, electric heat pumps, green hydrogen and other clean energy technologies. Modeling released last year by the research firm Energy Innovation found that cutting U.S. emissions in half by decade’s end — which scientists say is needed to avoid truly catastrophic warming — would grow the economy by $570 billion annually by 2030, and avoid 45,000 premature deaths through reduced air pollution.
President Biden’s Build Back Better Act, which is stalled in the Senate, would go a long way toward helping the U.S. meet that emissions goal, according to a report from the REPEAT Project, which is led by Princeton University researchers. The bill would also reduce household energy costs by $300 a year on average and drive a net increase of 2 million jobs, researchers found.
And let’s not forget the geopolitical benefits, which are front of mind after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“We also need to be thinking about the new world order that we are now living in. Everything has changed,” Jesse Jenkins, a Princeton energy engineer, said in a webinar on the REPEAT Project report. “The United States has a considerable opportunity to reshape the global energy landscape with the kinds of investments that are in the Build Back Better Act.
“We can’t just put a Band-Aid on things and move on. We really need to deeply think about how to restructure the global energy system to avoid this kind of exposure to the whims of a single country, or a single man.”
There’s a reason U.S. military leaders have been taking climate change seriously for years. The Pentagon first called global warming a “threat multiplier” in 2014, later warning that the climate crisis “will have wide-ranging implications for U.S. national security interests over the foreseeable future because it will aggravate existing problems — such as poverty, social tensions, environmental degradation, ineffectual leadership and weak political institutions — that threaten domestic stability in a number of countries.”
All of which gets at the key point, which is that climate change touches every aspect of life — as does the urgent need to stop polluting. Wildfires, war, energy, drought, heat, floods, migration, pandemics, asthma, wildlife, housing, coastlines, rivers, crops, meat, freeways, supply chains, air travel, trash, plastics — everything is a climate story.
And if Ukrainian leaders have their way, the planet’s biggest polluters will keep those stories at the top of their agendas.
During the Glasgow climate summit last fall, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote that it is “the moral duty of wealthy countries to help developing ones ensure green modernization of their economies.” If humanity fails to slow the pace of climate change, he wrote, “after 2030 the social and economic losses will be so significant that we simply can’t even imagine it.”
Even as Russian forces laid siege, Ukraine sent delegates to a United Nations meeting to finalize the new global climate report. The discussions were closed to the public. But according to the Washington Post, the Ukrainian scientist Svitlana Krakovska declared that the climate crisis and the Russian invasion “have the same roots — fossil fuels, and our dependence on them.”
“We will not surrender in Ukraine. And we hope the world will not surrender in building a climate-resilient future,” she said.
It’s a powerful message — about as powerful as it gets. Will the rest of the world listen?
