Deadly heat and Russia’s war in Ukraine are delivering a brutal double whammy, upending the global energy market and forcing some of the world’s largest economies into a desperate scramble to provide electricity to their citizens.
Europe found itself in a nasty feedback loop this week as record temperatures sent electricity demand soaring but also forced a sharp power outage at the region’s nuclear plants as extreme heat made it difficult to cool reactors.
France on Tuesday detailed its plan to renationalise its electricity company EDF to strengthen the nation’s energy independence by refreshing its fleet of aging nuclear plants. Russia, which for decades has supplied much of Europe’s natural gas, has left Europe guessing whether it will resume gas flows later this week through a key pipeline. Germany has pushed the European Union to green-light cheap loans for new gas projects, potentially extending its dependence on fossil fuels for decades.
The cascading effects of war and the coronavirus pandemic on energy and food prices have punished the world’s poorest citizens. In Africa, 25 million more people live without electricity now than before the pandemic, the International Energy Agency estimated.
Meanwhile, in the United States, the largest emitter of greenhouse gases in history, extreme temperatures scorched the South and West as prospects for national climate legislation collapsed in the nation’s capital. At the same time, global oil companies reported soaring profits as oil and gas prices rose.
In fact, the world’s ability to slow climate change is not only being undermined by the fossil fuel producers themselves who are responsible for climate change, but is further fueled by the killer heat, a telltale marker of climate change.
At a global conference aimed at reviving climate action in Berlin, German Foreign Minister Analena Berbock called climate change the world’s “biggest security challenge” and urged countries to use Russia’s war as an impetus to move faster to renewable energy. “Today, fossil fuels are a sign of dependence and lack of freedom,” she said on Tuesday. Germany relies on Russian gas for 35% of its energy needs.
At the same conference, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres put it more bluntly. “We continue to fuel our dependence on fossil fuels,” he said.
The Berlin meeting came amid a dark moment in global climate action.
Without climate legislation in Washington, it is nearly impossible for the United States to meet its national climate goal, nor can it exert much diplomatic pressure on China to slow its rising emissions.
Europe’s transition from fossil fuels
The European Union has begun a transition to greener forms of energy. But financial and geopolitical considerations can complicate the effort.
China currently produces the largest share of global warming gases and plays a central role in the planet’s climate future: it burns more coal than any other country right now, but it also produces the largest share of the world’s new green energy technologies, including solar panels and electric buses.
A big question mark is whether EU lawmakers will use the invasion of Ukraine to accelerate their shift away from fossil fuels, or simply import gas from places other than Russia.
The stakes are high. The EU’s climate law requires the 27-nation bloc to cut its emissions by 55 percent by 2030. More coal plants are slated to close than ever before, and there is no evidence that Europe is going back to coal for good, although some countries are restarting operations of coal plants to meet immediate energy needs. “Coal is not coming back,” reads the headline of a report published last week by Ember, a research group.
EU lawmakers are also encouraging building owners to renovate older homes and businesses to improve energy efficiency. And under EU law, no new cars with internal combustion engines must be sold from 2035.
If anything, analysts say, the current crisis calls attention to not doing more sooner. “We have seen some progress, but if we look at the overall picture, it is not enough,” said Hanna Fekete, a climate policy analyst at the NewClimate Institute, an organization in Cologne that promotes efforts to tackle climate change. “We’ve missed so many opportunities for energy efficiency.”
The biggest effect of the global energy crisis is on the world’s ability to slow climate change. The burning of fossil fuels is the main cause of global warming because the greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere trap the sun’s heat, raising average global temperatures and triggering extreme weather events, including record heat.
As rich industrialized countries such as the United States and those in Europe are reluctant to divest from fossil fuels, emerging economies are under pressure to do so. After all, they argue, the world’s wealthier nations, not the poorer ones, are most to blame for the generations of greenhouse gas emissions that are wreaking havoc on the climate today and disproportionately harming poorer people.
This point was made loud and clear by South African Environment Minister Barbara Creasey at the Berlin conference this week. “Developed countries must continue to take the lead with ambitious action,” she said. “The ultimate measure of climate leadership is not what countries do in times of comfort and convenience, but what they do in times of challenge and controversy.”
Rich countries have yet to provide the promised $100 billion in annual funding to help poor countries shift to renewable energy. Many already indebted countries are sinking deeper into debt as they try to recover from extreme weather disasters exacerbated by climate change.
Russia, one of the world’s largest oil and gas producers, invaded Ukraine at a time when energy prices were already on the rise.
At the end of last year, oil and gas prices were high and rising, in part because U.S. oil and gas production plummeted at the start of the coronavirus pandemic and never recovered.
Russia began curbing supplies to Europe as early as last September, helping push European electricity prices to their highest levels in more than a decade at the time. At the same time, demand for gas in Europe has rebounded as the economy picked up after the pandemic shutdown and mild weather led to a drop in wind-generated power.
In February, Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, and Russia further cut gas flows to its European customers, starting with Bulgaria and Poland in April. Germany fears it will be next as the country waits to see if Gazprom, the state-owned Russian energy giant, will resume flows through the pipeline that links Siberian gas fields to the German coast. It was shut down on July 11 for what is supposed to be only 10 days of annual maintenance.
Several European countries are currently racing to fill their gas storage tanks in time to have enough energy to heat homes and run industry in winter. EU officials worry that if Russia does not resume gas flows, the bloc will not reach its 80 percent capacity target by early November.
“The world has never witnessed such a major energy crisis in terms of its depth and complexity,” International Energy Agency chief Fatih Birol said last week.
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