Putin, the Closeted Environmentalist
If this piece were being written for the satirical publication The Onion, it would theatrically laud war-mongering autocrat Vladmir Putin as an environmental hero — one who created more incentive for the world to act decisively on 30 years of cumulatively ignored climate science and watered-down IPCC reports than any other nation or individual has ever managed to do — and I’m even including Greta Thunberg! It would explain how his murderous invasion of the sovereign nation of Ukraine is actually Putin’s attempt at a serious ecological wake-up call — a cacophonous shout-out indicting the globally unsustainable, oil and gas energy dependent state of “business as usual.” By directly linking the purchase of Russian oil and gas with those same dollars then going to support the bloody subjugation of innocent Ukrainians, Putin has created a perfect reason for the World, and Europe in particular, to go on a crash “energy” diet.
But back on planet Earth on the pages of actual, fact-based newsprint reporting, Putin is clearly NOT a climate warrior, even as he hopes that the Siberian tundra will become fertile farmland in a warmer climate (while warming makes historically fertile areas uninhabitable) or that it will allow him unfettered access to drill for oil and minerals in a relatively ice-free Arctic Ocean — one could picture him as almost comically Dr. Evil if not being constantly reminded of the loss of life he is causing in real-time. But he HAS given the Global North, particularly the Eurozone, the incentive to do what the science has long demanded it do — to make immediate and massive cuts to its use of fossil fuels. Bill McKibben, an actual climate warrior and founder of the environmental non-profit 350.org, already made this argument in a timely manner in this article published in very first days of the war. And since then, the argument for complete European divestiture from Russian fossil fuels has only been strengthened by the Kremlin’s demand for “non-friendly” (i.e. unfriendly to Russia’s war on Ukraine) Euro customers to pay their gas bills in roubles, thereby propping up Russia’s sanctions’-stricken national currency at the same time it funds its war in Ukraine. Wow.
Europe gets roughly 40% of its natural gas and 25% of its oil from Russia. The World (but mostly the industrialized nations plus India and China) need to cut emissions by significantly more than this in the next 8 years to have a snowball’s chance in a warming arctic of staying on track for the lower threshold (1.5°C) of guaranteed warming, which if you do the math in this year of 2022, would be essentially impossible given the current economic growth paradigms. Instead of dropping since the landmark Paris Agreement of 2015, carbon emissions have been rising steadily every year with the exception of 2020, where they dropped by some 6% only due to a worldwide shutdown caused by an, up till now, once-in-a-lifetime Pandemic. When you consider that we need a Pandemic shutdown every year for the next 8 years to have any chance at meeting our climate goals, the “Hail-Mary” immediacy for energy transition created by the current humanitarian crisis in Ukraine is critical to grasp.
History has shown that human beings generally only change their more self-serving behaviors and engage in selfless behaviors in times of war or other calamity and Europeans now have a trifecta of reasons to massively reduce their energy consumption — solidarity with the suffering of their Ukrainian neighbors, starving Putin’s bellicose regime of much needed cash to continue waging war AND a chance to make critical progress towards mitigating current and future harm from the ever-worsening climate crisis. And while Europeans will be on the front lines initially, a complete boycott of Russian oil and gas by its biggest clients would continue to ripple through the rest of the world’s energy markets, creating similar incentives for both the reduction of energy consumption per se and the more rapid transition to renewables for the energy still consumed.
Sadly, far from a satirical portrayal of Putin as a closeted environmentalist, in a more suitable metaphor Putin is the neighborhood (re: Europe) Heroin (re: fossil fuels) dealer who uses your drug money to sell you things that will cause you and all of society great harm, while at the same time, reinvesting his profits to buy automatic weapons with which he then shoots at your neighbors.
If we collectively, but Europe in particular, cannot seize this moment to get off oil and gas, with the suffering of innocent Ukrainians as a call for solidarity with our fellow free citizens to motivate us, then regardless of who wins the battle for Ukraine, we will have lost the war for a habitable future on this planet.
