The west can cut its energy dependency on Russia and be greener
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has amplified the importance of national-security considerations in western countries’ energy policies. At the same time, governments must continue to focus on reducing environmental damage – in particular, on cutting greenhouse-gas emissions. Both goals, geopolitical and environmental, are urgent and should be evaluated together.
These two objectives are not necessarily in conflict, as some believe. There are plenty of energy measures the west can adopt that would benefit the environment and further its geopolitical aims. The most obvious steps, especially for the European Union, are sanctions that reduce demand for imports of fossil fuels from Russia.
A review of different areas of energy policy reveals further options. Here, I emphasise the dos and don’ts that seem to be clear win-win choices, as opposed to policy decisions where tradeoffs are acute and reasonable observers may disagree.
The first policy choice is a blunt one: governments should not prolong the life of coal and should withdraw coal subsidies. The International Monetary Fund has estimated that global energy subsidies (including for oil and natural gas, as well as coal), at either the producer or consumer end, exceed $5tn a year. Direct US fossil-fuel subsidies alone have been conservatively estimated at $20bn annually.
Next, policymakers should regulate natural gas. Continental Europe has made itself dependent on Russian gas, and US shipments of liquefied natural gas can help substitute for it. But if there is to be a renewal of the fracking boom, which actually reduced total US carbon dioxide emissions from 2007 to 2012, careful regulation should drastically reduce the amount of methane released into the atmosphere as part of
Read more on theguardian.com
