What the Ukraine War Means for the Future of Climate Change
Illustration by The New York Times; Photography by Sean Gallup, Johanna Geron, Scott Olson, and Mikhail Klimentyev, via Getty Images
At the end of February, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of experts convened by the United Nations, released a scientific report warning that the dangers of global warming are mounting so rapidly that adapting to them could soon become impossible. “Delay,” the U.N. secretary general said of the findings, “means death.”
The report came out just days after President Vladimir Putin of Russia began his assault on Ukraine, so the world’s attention was understandably trained elsewhere. But soon enough, commentators began pointing out the role that Russia’s fossil fuel trade has played in underwriting the invasion, thrusting climate change and its causes back into the spotlight.
“The world is paying Russia $700 million a day for oil and $400 million for natural gas,” Oleg Ustenko, an economic adviser to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, told The New Yorker this month. “You are paying all this money to a murderous leader who is still killing people in my country.”
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.
Unlike the United States, the European Union has not banned imports of Russian oil and gas, and it’s no secret why: Europe relies on Russia for about one-third of its oil and 40 percent of its natural gas. (The United States, by contrast, gets none of its natural gas and only about 3 percent of the oil it consumes from Russia.)
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 meltdown, 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.