“The latest victim of the war in Ukraine? The fight against climate change, ”said a headline in the New York Times at the end of June. In July last year, the European Commission took a series of decisions with the aim of bringing the continent on the path of climate neutrality by 2050.
“The fossil fuel economy has reached its limit,” said Ursula von der Leyen, the president. A little over a year later, the European Commission itself is managing tens of billions of euros in spending on infrastructure and fossil fuel supplies in an effort to offset the rise in prices and cuts in Russian gas.
Alice Hancock, Brussels correspondent for the Financial Times business newspaper, spoke about it last week.
“The European Union, which until yesterday depended on Russia for about 40 percent of its gas and more than half of its coal, seems to have little choice,” writes Hancock: “Many industries, from fertilizer producers to foundries of zinc, they were forced to close because they could not pay the fuel costs. Energy bills are pushing consumers to the poverty line ”.
All together, European countries are in third place for greenhouse gas emissions after the United States and China. For this reason, the sharp European slowdown in the green transition, which has been painstakingly initiated in the past months, can have repercussions on a large scale.
According to some it is only a passing phenomenon that does not change the long-term objectives, while others warn that there is a risk of further consolidating dependence on fossil fuels. In any case, it is another of the effects of the war unleashed by Putin with the invasion of Ukraine, and in particular of the use of energy resources as a weapon of war. ◆