Putin’s net zero world
What the invasion of Ukraine says about the geopolitics of climate change.
Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine represents not just a humanitarian and geopolitical disaster but also a major obstacle in the race to net zero.
Holding global governments to the commitments they make at global climate summits is hard enough. But what if there is a major global power inured to international criticism and whose narrow national interests are diametrically opposed to decarbonization? This month, the world has woken up to the fact that this nation exists, and its capital is Moscow.
To date, the assumption has been that the world’s most influential actors, whether they wield power in Beijing, Washington, New Delhi, Brasilia, or Berlin, could by and large be cajoled and threatened into pursuing policies that—at the very least—will not actively undermine global ambitions to brin global carbon emissions to “net zero” by 2050.
But Putin’s Russia is uniquely immune to global opprobrium, and Russia’s current leadership sees the global conversation on climate change as a direct threat to its own quest to recapture the status it lost when the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s. Indeed, climate change is routinely portrayed as a conspiracy by the US-led liberal world order to keep Russia down.