Olaf Scholz, Germany’s new chancellor, has come up with a more vigorous response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine than many (including me) would have expected, whether it’s freezing the Nord Stream 2 pipeline approval process or proposing a massive (if long overdue) increase in German defense spending.
However, there are certain steps that he is not going to take.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz today pushed back against calls from the U.S. and Ukraine for a ban on imports of Russian gas and oil as part of international sanctions on Moscow.
“Europe has deliberately exempted energy supplies from Russia from sanctions,” Scholz said in a statement, adding: “At the moment, Europe’s supply of energy for heat generation, mobility, power supply and industry cannot be secured in any other way. It is therefore of essential importance for the provision of public services and the daily lives of our citizens.”
…Scholz said that his government and European partners have been “working hard for months” to develop alternatives to Russian energy supplies, but stressed that “this cannot be done overnight.
That, sadly, is true. Not only did Germany develop an unhealthy dependence on Russian gas, but it failed to develop a realistic plan B to develop alternative sources of supply in the event that there was a falling out with Putin. And Germany was not, of course, the only European country to fall into this trap.
To say that this cannot be sorted out “overnight” is to put it very mildly indeed. To take one example, for all the talk of a Berlin airlift-style operation to deliver liquefied natural gas (LNG ) to Europe, there are not as yet enough tankers, liquification facilities (at the exporting end) or regasification terminals in Europe to fill the gap.
And there’s another problem, it seems, with that approach too.
White House efforts to boost U.S. liquefied natural gas exports and cut Europe’s reliance on Russian gas after the invasion of Ukraine are proceeding slowly, because of concerns about the impact on climate change, government and industry sources said.
The White House was weighing the announcement of an interagency review of ways to boost LNG exports to Europe alongside Tuesday’s decision to ban U.S. imports of Russian oil products, people briefed on government decision-making told Reuters.
However, the interagency review has been shelved, at least for now, after some in the White House argued it would counter the administration’s efforts to wean the U.S. off fossil fuels consumption and production and tackle climate change, the sources said.
The priorities of the Biden administration are . . . interesting.
In time, doubtless (which will be more likely a matter of years than months, although the EU Commission is convinced that the plan it has produced would reduce demand for Russian gas by two-thirds in 2022), a solution can be implemented, but until that time arrives, Putin has the threat to turn off the taps, a threat that will hang over much of the EU until then.
In an article for Bloomberg Green, Akshat Rathi and John Ainger look at whether people could be persuaded to use less fuel (current high prices will, I suspect, probably do quite a bit of that persuading), or even whether Europe should consider “rationing energy supplies to avoid importing from Russia.”
Rathi and Ainger conclude:
Most climate scenarios involve reducing energy use as one of hundreds of steps that will help countries zero out planet-warming emissions. But it’s been hard to get most people to treat global warming as an emergency. Nobody questions the emergency nature of wars, which removes many political constraints, including on asking for energy sacrifices.
“If not now, then when?” said Bryony Worthington, a member of the [British] House of Lords and co-chair of Peers for the Planet.
Never let a war go to waste.