Sorry, natural gas pipelines aren’t temporary
Svitlana Romanko holds a key that can open two doors. The first is the door to peace for her homeland, Ukraine. The second is the door to a more habitable Earth for us and future generations. The Ukrainian climate activist and lawyer is presenting this key to delegates at the Stockholm+50 environmental conference happening now in Sweden. Her message: End the global fossil fuel addiction that fuels Putin’s war machine.
As if on cue, the European Commission this week announced tightened protocols on Russian fossil energy imports, with pledges to ban sea-borne crude within six months and pipeline oil as soon as landlocked nations are assured alternatives. But instead of seizing this pivotal moment to turbocharge the deployment of clean energy, the continent is embarking on the biggest buildout of oil and gas infrastructure in a generation.
Germany plans to build liquified natural gas (LNG) import terminals that will take years to build and operate for decades. The European Commission will source American gas through 2030, requiring massive investment in LNG on both sides of the Atlantic. Italy has made new deals to get gas from Algeria, Azerbaijan, Angola and Congo, requiring expansion of pipeline networks. New interconnector pipelines are planned throughout Europe to connect with existing arteries, including the recently completed Gas Interconnector Greece-Bulgaria pipeline.
U.S. climate leadership has also faded in the fog of war. President Biden and his team are calling on fossil fuel producers to radically ramp up production and have opened new swaths of federal lands to drilling. In an attempt to stabilize gyrating energy markets, Biden has even dispatched envoys to try to broker deals with the Saudis, Venezuela and UAE. The administration is fast-tracking fossil gas plants and LNG terminals with economic lives of half a century or more, all while promising to “walk and chew gum at the same time.”
This is not what Svitlana, and the hundreds of NGOs backing her, have in mind when they call on the world to get off Russian energy. The climate doesn’t give a damn about the provenance of carbon emissions.
Europe and the U.S. are deepening our security crisis and our climate crisis at the same time. It doesn’t have to be this way. Solar power plants coupled with advanced battery storage, offshore wind farms, fossil-free mass transit, EVs, energy efficiency and weatherproofing, all can be deployed more swiftly, cheaply and safely than their fossil-fuel-powered counterparts. All the enabling conditions to make a close-to-clean break with fossil fuels are here now. The tech is ready, the economics are ready and the people are ready.
To be sure, leaders in the U.S. and Europe insist their current fossil free-for-all is just a temporary response to the Ukraine crisis. Climate action, they claim, is still an urgent priority and the promise of the Paris Agreement is still alive. But the physics of the climate system and the economics of capital stock turnover beg to differ.
There is nothing short-term about hundreds of miles of new pipelines. There is nothing temporary about a buildout of new LNG terminals, themselves just part of a vast matrix of steel and diesel, including drilling rigs, heavy trucks, pipelines and tanker ships.
Once the billions have been sunk and the oil and gas are flowing, companies and petrostates have every incentive to keep them going. Most of these new pipes and plants will just be hitting their stride in 2050 — the year by which major economies have pledged to zero out emissions.
Putin invaded Ukraine days before a major report warned that the window for climate action is almost closed. This “damning indictment of failed climate leadership” said that emissions will have to drop 45% this decade. Instead, they are projected to rise by 14%.
Rather than blow smoke at the next big climate conference, world leaders should convene an urgent meeting with the world’s top solar, wind and battery manufacturers and installers, as well as experts in green building and transport systems. They should use 21st-century tech to advance a 21st-century Marshall Plan to rebuild the West after the ravages of the fossil fuel era. Together, countries and companies should come to an agreement on the best enabling policies to let cleantech thrive so that we might survive.
Svitlana’s speech Friday will undoubtedly prompt sympathetic nods, even some tears. She might emerge as Ukraine’s Greta. If it ends there, however, world leaders should promptly hand in their ceremonial sashes, monogrammed cuff-links and tiaras. They should go home and pass the torch to a younger set, who can see past their noses.
We can be free from the tyranny of petrostates and the tyranny of climate. The key is one and the same: Replace fossil fuels with renewable energy now, not after this crisis, or the next.
Vondrich is the former director of Divest Invest and a Public Voices fellow with the OpEd Project, in partnership with the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.
endure the longest commutes in the country because there’s apparently no money for fast ferries from the South Shore, let alone for a direct rail link. We’ll live in the shadow of a bridge with a $20 toll but take comfort in the nice Penn Station that Garcia says we need.
John Colella