Stand up to Putin and win the climate war

If it is true that Europe is built on the basis of crisis, it will come out of it strong, robust and cohesive, or without any future.

Geopolitics has returned to the forefront claiming the strategic role it always had.

In December 2019, Ursula Von der Leyen, recently elected president of the European Commission, attended the climate summit held in Madrid to announce the European Green Deal, the strategy that aspired to transcend environmental policy to become the model development of a Europe that, listening to science, understood that the only possible future was to speed up the ecological transition.

Today we prove that all the knowledge about the climate generated over decades of study was correct.

With the uncertainty inherent in the matter and aware that, to a large extent, we are already walking on unknown terrain, we have palpable evidence that the worst scenarios are going to come to pass if we do not accelerate the actions aimed at counteracting them.

Heat waves are chained with record temperatures throughout Europe, fires ravage the continent, drought worsens throughout the South, and it is finally understood that the climate crisis impoverishes and kills especially those who have the least.

Social tensions, inequality, poverty and migratory movements are some of the consequences.

Since Von der Leyen presented the European Green Deal, the world has undergone important changes.

A pandemic reminded us that our health depends on the biosphere, that we have built an interdependent world and that in the knowledge society, despite progress, we do not even know everything we do not know.

When we were beginning to see light in the effort to address these challenges, accelerate the ecological transition and confront inequality, war broke out at the gates of Western Europe.

Putin invaded Ukraine and unleashed a chain of events that is beginning to reveal its consequences.

Among these, the slowing down, if not halting or reversing, of one of the key transformations to address climate challenges, the energy transition.

The economic sanctions strategy quickly exposed Europe's dependence on Russian energy.

In those first weeks the debate was about whether Europe, led by Germany, would have the courage to tell Putin that it was stopping buying oil and gas from him, thus cutting off an important source of income for him.

Today it is Putin who has Europe terrified with the possibility of closing the gas tap, leaving the most powerful European economies in check, and he has turned that into a weapon of war.

Experts from all countries draw scenarios of how this possibility can affect the economies and way of life of a Europe accommodated in abundance.

The first moves made by the Commission threaten to reissue the pulse of some countries against others within the Union, as was experienced in the financial crisis of 2008. It places the debate in a framework of accusations of lack of solidarity, instead of raising it in terms of effectiveness: what are the most efficient and effective policies to achieve the common goal, which is to achieve European independence from both Russian energy and fossil fuels.

There are two lines that are making their way: to ensure supply by purchasing gas and oil from other suppliers, and to reduce consumption, increasing savings and efficiency.

As a background, together with the urgency, the greatest risk: the slowdown, if not the reversal, of the ecological transition, the roadmap that the European Union had given itself to lead sustainability policies.

Faced with the possibility that, immediately, the guarantee of supply will be broken, Europe is desperately looking for new sellers of gas and oil and is preparing to set up the necessary infrastructures to regasify, transport and manage the precious energy.

As it is possible that it will not arrive in time, the solution is an accelerated return to the past that leads countries like Germany, even with the Greens in the Executive, to return to burning coal.

At the same time, the economic measures to deal with the crisis do not hesitate to finance fossil fuels, such as diesel or gasoline.

The emergency of managing the immediate leads to having to make devilish decisions.

The measures that were taken in the first moments of the war were motivated by urgency and immediacy.

The months are passing and what is perceived on the horizon may be a setback far removed from the path that Europe had marked out as a guarantee of sustainability and that made it lead the world in decarbonisation.

Perhaps in the short term there are no other alternatives to guarantee supply, but all mechanisms should be activated to restrict them as soon as possible.

To the guarantee of supply we must add another one that is just as urgent and more transcendent, the guarantee that life continues to be possible on the planet.

Hence, these types of solutions, always taken as last options, should be thought of as something transitory, with the firm will not to perpetuate them.

The second line that appears in the European strategy has to do with savings and efficiency.

There is no doubt that saving energy, like water and many other things, is a moral imperative.

The fact that it has to be remembered says a lot about a society that is very often shown to be oblivious to criteria of rationality.

Now, urged by the war, it is no longer an ethical principle, not even an aesthetic one, but rather a need derived from risk, so the situation changes considerably.

However, a huge mistake would be made if everything was entrusted to the ethereal field of awareness and individual responsibility.

In all the studies in this regard, a very significant increase in environmental awareness of European societies is shown, reaching practically 98% of the population, who say they feel concerned about it.

So much so, that the phenomenon of eco-anxiety has even appeared —especially in young people—, understood as the set of emotions that add sadness, depression, fear or impotence, generated by the environmental damage caused by climate change. climate and its consequences.

However, the same citizens that show great sensitivity on the subject, have reservations when it comes to adopting changes in their behavior.

And if that was not enough,

Raising awareness about common goods such as the climate and appealing to individual responsibility is an obligation, but it is only a minimum.

The most effective way to bring about behavioral change remains to enable the infrastructures that make it happen and to lead by example.

If the offensive to rehabilitate buildings by increasing their efficiency is not intensified, if energy-saving technologies are not definitively incorporated into all devices, if public transport is not significantly reinforced, etc., it can and should be requested savings, but its effectiveness will be reduced and its legitimacy questioned.

In terms of ecological transition, the time for awareness has long passed.

Today, when a war puts Europe between a rock and a hard place, we cannot stay there.

Winning the war against Putin must also mean fighting for the climate.

These are times to limit the contradictions and stay the course in the midst of a crisis.

Cristina Monge

is a political scientist and an expert in governance for the ecological transition.

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