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by Rishi Kant 17 October 2022
Ever since the Ukraine-Russia war started, Europe has been facing a tough situation on the energy front. The situation got precarious with the onslaught of adverse climatic events and associated heatwaves leading to a zooming up of the energy demand. The ongoing war, on the other hand, has put constraints on the supply of oil and gas to Europe, while putting upward pressure on oil and gas prices to reach historic highs. While, brent’s crude oil price, breached the 100 dollars per barrel level in March 2022. Natural gas not only breached its historic highs in 2021 but also continues running high in 2022. For Europe gas is a major source of energy, and it depends heavily on Russia to meet its gas-based demand (around 40 percent). Europe’s, hydropower capacities also got curtailed due to drying up the rivers and reservoirs. As a result, most European countries have started to fall back on coal-based sources of power generation, while coal consumption worldwide over reached a historic high.
This shift to coal is considered an important deviation on the policy front by Europe, who have often been proclaimed as champions of climate change and green energy while subjecting many developing countries to harsh criticism for their use of coal. It is pertinent to mention that Europe has been a votary of putting stringent targets for reducing coal-based power generation, across all the world, despite many of the developing countries’ resistance, as such an action would severely affect their energy security. Countries like India has always been at the forefront of criticism by Europe when it comes to coal-based power generation, despite having much lower emission in per capita terms compared to many countries including Europe. Europe has only around 7 percent of the world’s population, but it still uses almost 20 percent of the world’s resources[i].
With many European countries resorting to coal and reopening abandoned coal mines and coal power plants, the question is being raised over Europe’s position on the moral front, with many terming such policy flip-flop as another example of Europe’s hypocrisy.
European countries have defended their action, as a way to meet an unprecedented increase in the power demand and to make up for the shortage of natural gas due to war, while blaming the Russian-led invasion squarely for this adverse outcome. While Europe tries to hide behind the classic utilitarian perspective of morals/ethics, such an analogy would however be fallacious, when looked at from the macro perspective. Since taking forward the same logic would mean absolving all the developing countries from their responsibility of cutting down their emissions to meet their immediate energy requirement. This would accentuate the adverse climate events, resulting from higher emissions and sabotage the global fight against climate change, while reversing whatever little gains are being made so far. Moreover, putting the entire blame on Russia, would not be justified, as the counterfactual would have been the intensive use of natural gas to meet the rising energy demand, which is the mainstay of energy for Europe. Natural gas also accounts for significant greenhouse gas emissions (comparatively lower than coal) and Europe chooses natural gas simply as a low-hanging fruit over coal.
Also, it is not ethical to expect developing countries to meet the commitments, while the wealthy developed countries especially Europe, who have historically emitted the most and also have access to vast financial resources can ditch such commitments at their convenience.
The double standards of European countries are not restricted to the energy market only. Recently, Germany has rejected the European Union’s plan for putting a ban on the sales of new cars with combustion engines (fossil fuel based) from 2035, precisely, as the such move would have adversely affected their commercial interests, since Germany is one of the biggest automobile producers, with companies like Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes and Audi based in Germany.
Similarly, the agriculture sector is heavily subsidized by European countries. The biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the agriculture sector, such as beef and milk, receive very high subsidies in Europe.
Fighting climate change is the shared responsibility of both Europe and the rest of the world. Europe needs to do a lot more, including sharing technology with developing countries to ensure the standardization and popularization of clean energy. The commitment of $100 billion per year in climate finance to poor countries at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (CoP 15 in Copenhagen in 2009) is yet to be met, while the transfer of advanced green technologies to developing countries remains an illusion. What least Europe can do, after losing the moral high ground, is to act on the justified demands in terms of climate compensation and financing of the developing countries. However, for this to materialize “Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe’s problems are the world’s problem but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problems”.
(Views expressed are personal)
[i] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48215453